Previous versions up to this release candidate were available under the permissive MIT license which made it possible to incorporate it into closed-source applications (or actually basically any application I can think of right now). That has changed now. Since 2.0rc1 Pellet is available under dual-licensing terms with custom commercial licenses being the first and the Affero GPL Version 3.0 being the second option. From what I understand (or believe to understand) this means now that if you want to use Pellet in a closed-source environment, you either have to get into contract negotiations with Clark & Paria, or stick with version 1.5.2 (or work on some pluggable RPC/IPC-solution). Same goes for people who want to use Pellet within BSD/MIT licensed applications.
Don't get me wrong, though. I have nothing against the GPLv3 (although I'm probably not the biggest fanboy in the world if it comes to the Affero General Public Licenses) but I was definitely surprised by this drastic move. Moving from a permissive license like the MIT license to something like the AGPL, which is even more copyleftish than even the GPL ... Well, I definitely wish them luck with this new strategy. I really hope enough companies that can afford it will help sponsor the future development of this library :-)
This move definitely made me reconsider the use of the GPL for possible future project of my own, but soon realized at least something: I can't use it for everything or it might end up as a grey-area. For example: If I want to write a recipe for zc.buildout and license it under the GPLv3, there is quite a chance that I violate the GPL by doing so (because according to the GPL-FAQ a plugin that is not executed in a forked environment is actually incorporated into the main program and therefor forms a union with it).
These are just some observations by someone who prefers the BSD/MIT-licenses for their simplicity and who has really just the absolute minimum of knowledge about licensing, so don't take my word for it ;-) If you are a lawyer and know your way around licensing, please let me know if I misunderstood something here :-)
Hi,
The move to dual licensing may seem drastic or sudden, but we've been signalling for at least 6 months that it was going to happen, on the pellet-users list, on weblog posts and comments, etc.
It does not mean, necessarily, however, that Pellet 2.0 can't be used with BSD or MIT-licensed projects; it does mean, however, that we will need to make those decisions on a case by case basis, which gets to the whole point of the dual license move: to encourage users of Pellet to talk to us about how they are using it.
Oct. 29, 2008, 3:35 p.m.
Ah sorry, then I just missed that on the mailinglist and sorry for misinterpreting the dual-licensing model you're using :-)
Oct. 29, 2008, 3:37 p.m.