If you’ve ever had to work with some OWL-ontologies, you have definitely heard the name Pellet. It is perhaps the most wildly use opensource OWL-reasoner/engine out there. Yesterday Evren Sirin announced the release of the first release candidate of the upcoming version 2.0, that (among other things) includes preliminary support for OWL 2.0. But there is also a catch …
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 :-)
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