Quotes of the week

In what most people would think of as counter-intuitive, copyleft licences are more predominant amongst vendor-led open source projects. The reason for this is that some vendors choose to run a dual licensing business model where they put the code out under a restrictive copyleft license and ship a commercial license themselves. They usually combine the licensing regime with a contributor agreement. This means that the intellectual property is aggregated and owned by the sponsoring vendor. This provides the sponsoring vendor with the unique advantage of being able to distribute and package the code as they see fit under a commercial licensing regime. This is exactly the business model that Sun used with OpenOffice and, as I mentioned previously, the reason that the LibreOffice could only fork the code under a copyleft license.

Tridge,

With Samba well on its way to a third decade as of January this year, we wanted to thank you personally for your mentorship, guidance and leadership of the Samba project over the past twenty years. For the past decade, we have personally witnessed the strength of your technical innovations, and your passionate commitment to free software. The Samba Team and project is immeasurably stronger not only because of your amazing technical skill, but also by your dedication to the cause in the legal arena as well.