[Owncloud] company/community relationship

[Frank Karlitschek]

On 20.08.2012, at 11:11, Torsten Grote <grote at kolabsys.com> wrote:

> Hi Frank,
> 
> isn't this point
> 
> On Friday 17 August 2012 00:02:53 Frank Karlitschek wrote:
>> - ownCloud, Inc. is a software company built around the ownCloud Open
>> Source project and is fully committed to Open Source principles.
> 
> in conflict with these points?
> 
>> - All members of the ownCloud community understand that ownCloud Inc. can
>> sell proprietary licenses for ownCloud to its customers. As in many Open
>> Source companies, parts of the proceeds flow back into the ownCloud
>> community, e.g. through sponsorships or employing ownCloud community
>> developers.
> 
>> - ownCloud, Inc. may choose to develop proprietary enterprise extensions to
>> ownCloud. Those extensions are optional, and will not be required to run
>> standard ownCloud.
> 
> How can ownCloud, Inc. be _fully_ committed to Free Software principles while 
> developing proprietary extensions? Does this mean that ownCloud is going the 
> neo-proprietary/open-core route now?

No. We thought very hard about this and discusses it with a lot of people. I think even with you a few month ago :-)

I think it´s always a very difficult and interesting question where to draw the line between the commercial and the community interests. If you do this right than there is the potential to create great synergy effects for both parts so that both parties benefit more than they would alone.

The perfect solution is of course, in my opinion, is if you find a solutions that has no drawbacks for both parties but only benefits. And I really think that we have this here.

Dual Licensing:
From the free software perspective there is no real problem because it´s guaranteed that the code that the company want´s to sell in a dual licensed way is also available under the AGPL software which is the same license that we use anyways. So no drawback for the open source community. The community only enables the company to build up a business in parallel so that some of the income can flow back to sponsor development. Same situation that we had with Trolltech in a very successful way for years. The contributor agreement that´s needed here is very fair because it guarantees that every contributor has the same rights than before.

Proprietary Extensions:
We definitely don´t do the classic and stupid open core model here. There are open source projects out there where the community version is only some kind of demo version that you can´t use productively because core features where not there. I once tried to use an "open source" databases that couldn´t save to disk in the open source version. Stuff like this is a joke and is only misusing the reputation of free software.

ownCloud is and will always be full usable. One of the purposes of this document that we want to guarantee that this extensions are first: only optional and second: focused on enterprise use. Just as an example: We have potential customers asking for proprietary modules to integrate ownCloud with their internal backend systems but don´t want to see the code open sourced.
This is very important to us and also for me personally.
So again I think that the free software community has no drawback if this enterprise extensions exists and it doesn´t take anything away compared with the scenario that the ownCloud company doesn´t exist. 

So for me it looks like this: The open source community is kindly helping the ownCloud company to build up a business and gets a lot of free software contributions back additionally to sponsoring, marketing and other things. The free software community doesn´t has any drawback by doing this.

So this sounds fair to me. 
What do you think?



> I also don't see how you can sell proprietary licenses for code contributed by 
> the community without copyright assignment.

True. See my mail in a few minutes.


> Regards,
> Torsten



Regards
Frank