[Owncloud] company/community relationship

Mon Aug 20 16:36:53 UTC 2012

On 20.08.2012, at 18:19, Jos Poortvliet <jos at opensuse.org> wrote:

> On Monday, August 20, 2012 16:00:04 Frank Karlitschek wrote:
>> 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 just removed a long reply to this (twice!), but I notice what I wrote is 
> still long :(
> 
> Bear with me please:
> 
> Yes, I think you have pretty much the perfect solution, a great symbiosis 
> between company and community. It is fair and great.
> 
> With ONE problem: correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I can tell, you have 
> the '(trust my) Blue Eyes solution' as guarantee for ownCloud's side of this 
> deal. As it's all small, now, and everyone trusts Inc to do the right thing, 
> and Inc actually has little choice as it depends on goodwill and community at 
> the moment, and there are good people like you in charge, all is well.
> 
> But if you're serious about the ambitions for ownCloud taking on dropbox and 
> the like, you WILL find that these conditions will change and a Blue Eyes 
> solution won't cut it anymore. And this will do great harm to ownCloud - might 
> even kill it.
> 
> You mention Trolltech - let me mention MySQL and OpenOffice.org. ownCloud 
> might need an equivalent of the KDE-Free-Qt foundation...

We have that. The contributor agreement says in the exact same document that the contributions will directly released as AGPL which is the guarantee that it´s not possible to make it proprietary. The same way as the KDE-Free-Qt foundations guarantees the same for Qt.
It´s all baked into the same document. :-)

So if the ownCloud company and would become evil then there is still no way it can make ownCloud proprietary. The worst thing that could happen is that the company would stop contributing and releasing free software. This would be unfortunate of course but still can´t kill ownCloud. 
Needless to say that this won´t happen with the current team. The strategy we have is exactly the opposite. We invest heavily in ownCloud and free software and we have a legally binding guarantee that this contribution can't go away :-)

We invested significant time to set this up the right way :-)

>>> 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.
> 
> Looking forward to it :D
> 
>>> Regards,
>>> Torsten
>> 
>> Regards
>> Frank
>> 
>> 
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