Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core? [LWN.net]

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 19, 2010 23:57 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

Part of the reason why pretty much every distribution has moved from syslog to rsyslog instead of syslog-ng.

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 20, 2010 14:00 UTC (Tue) by frobert (guest, #62734) [Link] (3 responses)

Seems they have also realized this and going for an LGPL+GPL combo license: http://bazsi.blogs.balabit.com/2010/07/syslog-ng-contributions-redefined.html.

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 20, 2010 16:19 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Excellent! And Baszi used this as an excuse to make an architectural improvement as well :)

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 20, 2010 18:39 UTC (Tue) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link] (1 responses)

Very cool, but features still in syslog-ng enterprise that you pay for are in rsyslog for free.

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 21, 2010 6:25 UTC (Wed) by frobert (guest, #62734) [Link]

That's right. But as it goes, people have to make a living somehow. I think Bazsi would be the happiest if he hadn't have to maintain two different versions of the same stuff.

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 20, 2010 9:28 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Except that enterprise features migrate fairly rapidly into non-enterprise, and people do sometimes (not often) contribute features to non-enterprise which then go the other way.

syslog-ng's case is *much* more like what Artifex used to do with ghostscript.

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Aug 8, 2010 11:22 UTC (Sun) by bazsi (guest, #63084) [Link]

First of all, I want to make it clear that I'm biased on the syslog-ng case, but still wanted to express my opinion here. I'm biased as I'm the primary author of syslog-ng.

I think syslog-ng is a completely different case from the one described by Neary. The GPL version is not crippleware, it was never published for marketing purposes only and for the majority of syslog-ng's existence only the Open Source stuff existed. The Premium Edition is only about 3 years old and syslog-ng started in 1998.

We never removed features from the OSE version, the Premium Edition only included _additional_ features, and a lot of those are already available in the OSE.

Some examples:
* TLS support (became available in 3.0, almost 2 years ago)
* SQL destination (became available in 2.1, 2.5 years ago)
* performance improvements (3.0)
* etc.

In the other direction, we usually receive bugfixes and it is a pure technical reason that we used to require copyright assignment: I wanted to keep the two branches as close as possible (which if not done is the reason #1 why Open Core products become crippleware fast). _And_ since we heavily invested in automatic testing and our customers report bugs directly to us, we fix way more bugs in the OSE version than the community.

But anyway, I didn't think that the dual license model was so problematic at the time we made this decision 3 years ago. Our efforts have never been "Rotten to the Open Core". If you don't believe that, check out the git repository or read the mailing list archive and see it yourself.

And this whole mess is the past, OSE 3.2 has been relicensed, and it is true that we're going to publish non-free plugins, but anyone else is welcome to join and do the same.