I arrived in Paris last nite after a week in London with the Mule development team. We also met with a number of users and partners in London to outline the shape of the business and to discuss the next releases of the Mule product.
We spent a fair amount of time discussing the implications of our licensing scheme, something that I thought was very obvious. MuleSource uses a Mozilla plus attribution license which requires people to include reference to our software when embedding it in commercial products. So, if you use Mule in your software product and sell it commercially, then you are required to either make a licensing deal with us or keep the “powered by Mule” logo visible. Just as so many other things in OSS are confusing, it appears that this too has created some consternation-primarily because people want to embed Mule in their products and couldn't quite make sense of how the attribution would work.
My answer was simple. You make a deal with us for a commercial license and then you do whatever you want. People continue to misunderstand how open source and commercial licenses coexist around the same product-which is one of reasons why many software companies choose the GPL.
Thanks to our customers, users, partners (especially Alexis and John) and developers for making the trek out to London. This was the first time that the Mule team had met in real life despite working together for over a year!
While you can run your business totally disparately, it's great to get your team together and really hash things out. We walked away from the meet-up with the realization that it would have taken months to iron out some of the issues both with partners and our development team.
Off topic:
In the Parisian cab to our hotel the driver was playing Kid Loco and driving like a madman. I felt like I was living in a video game.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on November 16, 2006 02:02 AM
