

Open Source Madness or People are stealing Mayan EDMS. - orangethirty
http://orangethirty.blogspot.com/2012/08/open-source-madness.html

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dkulchenko
_If you fork Mayan EDMS into a closed or private respository, stop and think
about what you are doing because you going about it the wrong way. Likewise if
you fork Mayan EDMS and the first patch you commit is to change the name,
stop._

Both of those are allowed under the GPL. See
<http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/61038> for the former, and the latter
is allowed under just about any open source license so long as you adhere with
the rest of the terms; in fact, that's the pre-GitHub definition of a "project
fork". Under the GPL, others are even free to sell your software as long as
they link/ship the source code (probably not what's happening in your case,
but I'm mentioning that anyway for the sake of discussion).

 _How will this affect the future of Mayan EDMS? It is too early to tell, what
is certain is that the latest technologies being added to Mayan EDMS must be
protected until they are ready to be released._

I might be biased because anything I write is MIT/BSD-licensed, but I don't
understand why the fact that there's a few "unauthorized" forks of your
project out there is deterring you from continuing working on it. Chances are,
those forks have not a single user, and even if they do, so what?

~~~
siloraptor
I'm not opposed to the forks, there are 31 forks in github alone. My gripe is
with at least three fork, two being distributed under different names and
whose only patches are a name changed. Those may not be illegal, but are
unnecessary and unethical. The last fork is being distributed with just a
simple change of name also but being sold and no instruction or apparent
source code is being distributed.

"If you are distributing the software, your responsibilities kick in."

------
siloraptor
Thanks for posting, I'm the creator of Mayan EDMS and while stealing Open
Source software sounds like and oxymoron, it can and it does happen. In some
cases is just avoidance of the terms set in the license in other cases, such
in the case of Mayan EDMS they are just plain and blatantly selling the code
under another name!

~~~
rll
Then you should have chosen a license that doesn't explicitly allow that. Like
the previous poster said, this is perfectly fine under the GPL as long as they
provide the source code and since it is in Python I assume that they do.

~~~
rll
It sounds a bit like you didn't actually want to open source this code at all.
Open Source isn't, "Look, I am giving away my hard work for free." Open Source
means you give people the opportunity to build on top of your work. This is
how things evolve. If everyone has to start from square one every time they
have an idea for improving something they use it would slow everything down.
And yes, it means you will effectively end up competing with your own code for
mindshare and users, but presumably that doesn't frighten you. As long as they
abide by the terms of the license and let others to the same they are in the
same boat. If someone else does a better job improving the code, marketing it,
providing support, etc. more power to them. Chances are if your version is the
best supported contributions will flow back to you.

I personally prefer BSD-style licenses. I don't mind commercial competition at
all.

~~~
siloraptor
And I give the people the freedom to do with the code as they please, as long
as they follow the terms of the license. And I don't mind commercial
competition, in fact I promote it right in the website:
<http://rosarior.github.com/mayan/support.html>

