current OS license and the Source that lies ahead

[Attila Csipa]

On Tuesday 29 November 2005 19:32, Charlton Purvis wrote:
> state will always remain covered under the license below?  Basically I'm
> trying to make sure that a shop can't somehow repossess something that was
> originally OS thus preventing folks from using it like it's being used now.

I'm not a legal person so don't take this for granted, but as I understand it 
a license change cannot be retroactive (at least in most European countries I 
have experience with) without consent of both parties unless the original 
license was somehow flawed or legally unacceptable. This means that you could 
always use the code as per the license you got it with (eg the day before 
Autodesk or whoever came into the picture). I understand my few lines of 
crappy code in MapServer don't entitle me to make bold predictions and 
judgements, but my strong personal belief coming from my past experience is 
that Open Source Projects do not really exist without their communities, and 
I'm not sure the major software companies really get it - and only time will 
tell if Autodesk has gotten (or will get) it right with their old-new to be 
dual-license whatever-it's-called product. Having source available is one 
thing, but it's the Community that differentiates a real Open Source Project 
from (what I call) a Public project - something that is effectively funded by 
a single large entity hoping that people will get hooked on a 'free' version 
and eventually upgrade to their commercial versions. That would not be truly 
Open Source. That would be reinvention of the shareware concept of the early 
90's. (Trolltech with QT comes to mind and MySQL seems to be going more and 
more in that direction). This brings us to one of the most debated points in 
Open Source development and the worst result of an unrecoverable split in any 
OS community - the bane of the Fork. I sincerely hope that it this never 
happens here and the crack that appeared from the way the Foundation was 
formed will fill up with time and the MapServer community will be as unified 
on the future of MapServer as it was before the announcement. Thank for your 
patience reading so far, I hope I have not hurt anybodys feelings, and if I 
have inadvertently done so, accept my apologies.