Engine Licensing, an encouraging perspective on why to start

Rails
1

I was just talking about engines with a colleague and I came up with an
exceptional reason why Engines really are one-of-a-kind when it comes to
licensing.

As many of you may know, the GPL license states that a piece of GPL
licensed
code can not be included as a library within a commercially licensed
product
when is shipped to customers. It can however be included by the customer
upon installation, or packaged on the same CD as the commercially
licensed
product, but not to be included until post-installation of the
application,
and by the customer themselves.

I would first like to point out that there has been little to no mention
in
any of the code I have seen, other than in the core Rails, as to what
license it uses, which leaves everyone out on a limb when it comes time
to
understanding whether or not you can actually package your product with
an
Engine, generated code, plugin, or such in it.

That being said, with the advent of Engines, they may very well soon
contain
a GPL license or something similar restricting the usage of the
application
license which has that code included within its core.

With the methodology in place to install an Engine, whereby you can run
“script/plugin install
svn://example.com/plugins/my_ferrari_engine/testarossa” and the engine
will
be instantly deployed within that application in the
“vendor/plugins/testarossa” directory, you can require that after the
installation process of the commercial application has been completed,
install the engine with extreme ease, while still containing the
overriding
functionality in your core application simply waiting for the Engine to
be
dropped in.

Now, in comparison to that of a generator, which is as far as I can tell
the
closest thing to providing the full scope of functionality that engines
have
(models, controllers, libraries, tests, etc), when deployed it will
extract
its contents all over your core application and may even overwrite files
and
such as a generator has a tendency to do. An example is when you have
already run the scaffolding generator for a model/controller, and you
have
previously customized your “/stylesheets/scaffold.css” layout to be
unique.
When you run the scaffold again for a new model/controller you will be
prompted to overwrite that scaffold.css file. At this point, the
developer
has to make the decision whether or not he/she wants the to deploy the
updated StyleSheet based on the most recent generated scaffolding code.

This specific example could be solved by having a diff merge tool option
at
the time of overriding instead of having the yes/no/all prompt when it
comes
to a file that already exists and whether or not to overwrite it. But
that
still would leave the developer in this case, with the merge to handle
on
their own, which may or may not have conflicts.

So with that in mind, the generators result could not be included by
default
if it had anything other than a LGPL/MIT or compatibly commercially Zen
license. And if you were to run the generator afterwards, as explained
above, you would have to deal with conflicting files or complex scenario
analysis when deploying to ensure that no files are overwritten or are
properly overridden by secondary controllers and models within the same
/app/controllers/ and /app/models respective directories.

So as a result, you find yourself, with an Engine that has a GPL or some
other license that still has some rights reserved by the author when it
comes to re-licensing that sub-application, easily deployable after the
fact
of sale to your customer with a 100% commercial license that still
allows
for GPL software to be utilized in a symbiotic fashion.

This conclusion does leave the GPL licensors at a loss if they do
in-fact
refuse to have their application included in a commercial application.
Personally, I would be more apt to have more usage than less. As Bruce
Perens said in an interview with me previously, its not the generic code
that makes your business sink or swim, it’s the 10% differentiating code
that separates yourself, and allows you to soar. If businesses can spend
more time on the uniqueness of their product rather than on the basic
requirements of any application such as login/ACL/etc, the products
would be
better, and result in far greater usefulness of the tools we use ever
day.

For those that have heard little about Engines and want to know more,
visit:
http://rails-engines.rubyforge.org/

Warmest regards,
Nathan.

Nathaniel S. H. Brown Toll Free 1.877.4.INIMIT
Inimit Innovations Phone 604.724.6624
www.inimit.com Fax 604.444.9942

2

As far as I know, none of the “open source” licenses have ever been
tested in a court of law. So the so-called “rights” one has when one
“uses” the GPL, either by granting it or accepting it, may not in fact
exist.

In short,

a. You are free to give away your own intellectual property, as long as
you realize that someone might come along, as SCO did, and claim it was
not yours to give away, requiring you to spend money defending yourself.

b. You are not free to give away someone else’s intellectual property,
even if you didn’t know at the time you did that it was someone else’s.
You are obligated to do the research.

c. Many corporations view the GPL as a contaminant in their releases
as a result of a. and b. – having any GPL software in close association
with their proprietary software exposes them to huge financial and
legal risks.

So … once we’ve sorted out all the intellectual propery issues
associated with the GPL, we can move on to the more interesting
questions about how viable business models are that blur the rather
sharp distinction, at least in the USA, of for-profit (Red Hat) and
not-for-profit (Fedora Foundation) organizations. And yet another
interesting question – when will some for-profit organization “adopt”
the two major not-for-profit distros, Debian and Gentoo?

I’m sure DHH has all this worked out for Rails and the projects he built
upon Rails and abstracted Rails from. But how about larger projects? I’m
embarking on some Rails and Ruby projects, one of which will in fact be
a “commercial” one. DHH, any comments on the GPL – and the Ruby
license, which differs from the GPL in some subtle ways I don’t
understand?

I was originally planning to base it on an existing package (running on
the LAMP stack) which does exactly what I want, but the prospect of
having to teach a lawyer programming wasn’t particulary exciting. I may
still use that package because it’s well known and they’ve established a
partner program with commercial users. But I’m leaning towards doing
something a lot simpler based on Rails and sqlite.

–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

3

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

As far as I know, none of the “open source” licenses have ever been
tested in a court of law. So the so-called “rights” one has when one
“uses” the GPL, either by granting it or accepting it, may not in fact
exist.
'Fraid they do.

Translation of the ruling:

I’m sure DHH has all this worked out for Rails and the projects he built
upon Rails and abstracted Rails from. But how about larger projects? I’m
embarking on some Rails and Ruby projects, one of which will in fact be
a “commercial” one. DHH, any comments on the GPL – and the Ruby
license, which differs from the GPL in some subtle ways I don’t understand?

(I know I’m not DHH, but still…)

Surely the Ruby licence is irrelevant? It’s the Rails licence which is
relevant, and that’s MIT-licenced, so you can do almost anything with
it.

The GPL is even less relevant, because there’s nothing essential in
the stack that requires it, and anything brought in would be clearly
identified as such.

The main difference between the GPL and the Ruby licence that I could
see was that you’re allowed to distribute your modified binaries without
the source.

4

On 17.11.2005, at 16.03, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

I’m sure DHH has all this worked out for Rails and the projects he
built upon Rails and abstracted Rails from. But how about larger
projects? I’m embarking on some Rails and Ruby projects, one of
which will in fact be a “commercial” one. DHH, any comments on the
GPL – and the Ruby license, which differs from the GPL in some
subtle ways I don’t understand?

It’s not subtle ways, it’s indeed quite fundamental. So, in David’s
own words [1]:

One of the stances we have taken with Ruby on Rails is to release the whole thing under MIT license, which basically just says: â??You can do whatever you want, just donâ??t sue us.â?

So the difference is that GPL says anything derived from that code
will have to be released under GPL, too. There is no such restriction
in BSD or MIT licenses.

//jarkko

[1] http://jlaine.net/blog/83/interview-with-david-heinemeier-hansson

5

Alex Y. wrote:

German court enforces GPL

This is behind a registration page, so I can’t read it without giving
away private information. So … I’ll take your word for it.

Translation of the ruling:
http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/resources/feedback/OIIFB_GPL2_20040903.pdf

That was a little more interesting. Of course, it appears to have been
in a German court, not one in the USA. I’m curious how the German courts
deal with the issues of MP3 royalties. :slight_smile: So … yes … the GPL has
been tested and apparently upheld in a court of law, so I stand
corrected.

Surely the Ruby licence is irrelevant? It’s the Rails licence which is
relevant, and that’s MIT-licenced, so you can do almost anything with it.

I’m not sure the Ruby license is irrelevant, since the product must, to
be a product, not have external dependencies. In other words, I can’t
package a Rails app and say to a customer, “This is my product – you’ll
have to install Linux, Apache, MySQL and Ruby and agree to their
licenses before you can use it.” MySQL is rather irrelevant; I don’t
like their license and will either use SQLite or PostgreSQL, depending
on the database requirements. And Apache will be irrelevant if WEBrick
will do what I need – and I’m guessing it will.

So that means at a bare minimum, to deliver a complete application, I
need to package my application, Rails and Ruby, probably in a Windows
and Linux form. I don’t have a Mac to test on and I don’t have the funds
to get one. So the Ruby license is very relevant in this case.

The GPL is even less relevant, because there’s nothing essential in
the stack that requires it, and anything brought in would be clearly
identified as such.

Well, Linux for one is GPL :). As long as I don’t have to “package”
Linux, for example, by distributing my application as a LiveCD, I guess
the GPL is irrelevant. But … I’m seriously considering exactly that –
a LiveCD. So … guess what? The GPL is relevant! :slight_smile:

The main difference between the GPL and the Ruby licence that I could
see was that you’re allowed to distribute your modified binaries without
the source.

Thanks! I’m not sure I need to distribute “modified binaries”, although
for the Windows users, I’d be a non-starter if I required any
compilation steps for a user. So there would be binaries in that case.

–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

6

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

Alex Y. wrote:

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

'Fraid they do.

German court enforces GPL

This is behind a registration page, so I can’t read it without giving
away private information. So … I’ll take your word for it.
That’s funny… I got to it from a google search. I’ll see if I can
dig it up again, but it’s only a brief piece about the ruling below.

Translation of the ruling:
http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/resources/feedback/OIIFB_GPL2_20040903.pdf

That was a little more interesting. Of course, it appears to have been
in a German court, not one in the USA. I’m curious how the German courts
deal with the issues of MP3 royalties. :slight_smile:
Funnily enough…
http://www.toytownmunich.com/lofi/index.php/t19284.html

I’m not sure the Ruby license is irrelevant, since the product must, to
be a product, not have external dependencies. In other words, I can’t
package a Rails app and say to a customer, “This is my product – you’ll
have to install Linux, Apache, MySQL and Ruby and agree to their
licenses before you can use it.” MySQL is rather irrelevant; I don’t
like their license and will either use SQLite or PostgreSQL, depending
on the database requirements. And Apache will be irrelevant if WEBrick
will do what I need – and I’m guessing it will.
I really don’t follow your logic here. All products have external
dependencies. You certainly can package a Rails app and say “You’ll
need a functional Ruby stack before you can use it,” in exactly the same
way as you can say “Here’s a word processor. You’ll need a functional
version of Windows before you can use it.” Any software has a licence
agreement attached to it. If you’re selling a word processor, you’re
insisting that the user must have agreed to the licence for the
operating system it runs on, be that a BSD licence, the GPL, or a
Windows EULA.

If installing the stack is not something your customers are willing to
swallow, you can either package the whole stack, meeting the licence
requirements of each of the parts in turn, or host it for them and
sidestep the entire licensing issue completely. It’s not your customer
that would have to agree to the licences of (to take your example)
Linux, Apache, MySQL and Ruby, unless you’re planning on allowing them
to redistribute your work. The GPL explicitly excludes any claim over
running the code, and only covers distribution. The Apache licence is
similar, but the exclusion is implicit. MySQL is private-licenced, but
PostgreSQL is BSD-licenced, with no use restrictions, SQLite is public
domain, and Ruby gives you the option to use the GPL rather than its own
licence - but that makes no claims over use restriction either.

So that means at a bare minimum, to deliver a complete application, I
need to package my application, Rails and Ruby, probably in a Windows
and Linux form. I don’t have a Mac to test on and I don’t have the funds
to get one. So the Ruby license is very relevant in this case.
That’s a different question to the one I was considering. The question
was: “Given this third-party generator/plugin/engine/whatever, can I
continue to distribute my application under my current licencing scheme
if I include it in my code?” As far as I could tell, that was the
perspective of the original posting, and is completely independent from
the licence of anything lower down in the stack.

The GPL is even less relevant, because there’s nothing essential in
the stack that requires it, and anything brought in would be clearly
identified as such.

Well, Linux for one is GPL :). As long as I don’t have to “package”
Linux, for example, by distributing my application as a LiveCD, I guess
the GPL is irrelevant. But … I’m seriously considering exactly that –
a LiveCD. So … guess what? The GPL is relevant! :slight_smile:
Note my careful choice of words… There’s nothing essential in the
stack that requires it. Linux can happily be replaced with a non-GPL’d
OS, even for a LiveCD. But seriously - is it really that hard to meet
the conditions of the GPL? Bear in mind that it can apply to all levels
below your code, and leave you with room for an entirely separate
licence for your application code.

The main difference between the GPL and the Ruby licence that I could
see was that you’re allowed to distribute your modified binaries without
the source.

Thanks! I’m not sure I need to distribute “modified binaries”, although
for the Windows users, I’d be a non-starter if I required any
compilation steps for a user. So there would be binaries in that case.

And if you’re supplying unmodified binaries, you need to supply the code

  • or at least tell the user where they can find it. In Ruby’s case, all
    you’ve got to do is include a link to http://www.ruby-lang.org somewhere
    in your documentation, and include copyright attribution. That’s it.
    You don’t even need to include the source code. That would also cover
    anything under the GPL, by a certain reading of clause 3b.

That ended up longer than I intended :slight_smile: