Hi Justin,

ReleaseIt is really shaping up nicely! Great work!

Obviously you have not seen my code. :-)

Well regardless of how it looks, its working code, and I suspect it looks good enough, and you are just humble. In any case I'd be glad to help maintain it or enhance it over time, if you'd like to share the code. What I think would be ideal is to setup a project for it on Codeplex and make it a related project to mojoPortal so we can have a link between them. If you'd like to set it up and then make me a coordinator, that should give us both an ability to commit to a repository using svn and make it possible to link the projects. Or if you'd like me to set it up I can do it if you send me the source zip. Would need to pick a license to release under, preferably something very free like LGPL or MsPl, but its your decision. The only problem on codeplex is that svn merge doesn't work yet though they are working on fixing it. Committing to the same tree works but we would have to be careful to coordinate if we were both working on the same files. I've got enough to do that I probably won't be in your way and would just let you run with it. I'd be happy to review the code and offer feedback and if you get to a point where you're too busy but something else needs to be done I could help then.

About the web installer ideas, I agree building it in steps would be the way to go, starting with the most useful things first, and encapsulating the steps into libraries. From my perspective the downloading part is not essential as I can package the appropriate zips with the program either as embedded resources or just having it look for specific named zip files in the same folder as the exe. I'd like to be able to compile a new installer with each release and package all the release files as embedded resources. There would really just be one complete set of files pre-configured for MS SQL, then a separate zip for each data layer with just the data dlls which would replace the MS SQL version. I'd also have a zip for the mono compiled ones which would be used if it detects Mono or perhaps by a radio button in the UI. So the user would pick the database from a list and the correct data dlls will be installed.

Best,

Joe

Hi Justin,

My friend you continue to impress! I just had a peek at your start on the mojoPortal installer, I'll respond more about it on that thread.

Yes, I'm still waiting for the Codeplex Team to complete the needed merge feature. Last I heard it got delayed because they had some other priorities that came up. They still say they wil have it working soon, but I don't know exactly what soon means, my guess is another 4-8 weeks. But there is no hurry from my point of view, I can continue to use the Novell Forge svn server indefinitely. Its not a requirement of Codeplex that you use their repository as long as you are making source code releases on Codeplex. Having a presence on Codeplex is very helpful as thats the go to place for .NET folks looking for open source code. You could host your ReleaseIt repository at Novell Forge or google code or sourceforge and still make it available on Codeplex.

Licensing pre-amble: I am not qualified to give any legal advice, anything I say here is a laymans understanding (or misunderstanding).

For your ReleaseIt project, actually I see no problem going with the GPL, in fact thats probably the best choice now that I think of it, but for the mojoPortal Installer it would pose potential risks and snags, that I would like to avoid by not using GPL.

The problem (and perhaps benefit) of GPL is its viral clause, which basically says if your app depends on GPL code your app must also be released under the GPL. Now if you own all the copyright for the code you can dual license under GPL and some other commercial license to customers. This is the business model of MySql and quite a few other open source projects. In order to contribute code to those projects contributers must transfer copyright of any contribution to the project, otherwise MySql would have no ability to use the code under their commercial license. So, users can use MySql free, but if you embed it in your app and want to release it under a commercial license you have to buy a commercial license from MySql to be able to include it in your app.

I chose not to use the GPL or this model in mojoPortal. Licensing under GPL would make it less attractive for others to easily build and sell applications based on mojoPortal because they would have to buy a commercial license from me. Some people would do that and perhaps I could have made some money that way but my goal is for more people to use mojoPortal so I don't want to scare people away with the GPL. I want them to be able to bundle apps that plug into mojoportal with mojoPortal and I want them to be able to license their app using any license they want. I just don't want them to be able to obscure the fact that mojoPortal is in the package. It has to be in the documentation or fine print saying that it includes mojoPortal and mojoPortal is licensed under the CPL. I "think" the CPL gives me this support because they can't sub-license mojoportal except under the same terms as the CPL, but it allows them to license applications they bundle with mojoPortal under any license because it doesn't have the linking clause of the GPL. You can have a dependency on CPL code without the having to license as CPL, but you can't take the core of mojoportal and derive a new work and change the license.

Because of the viral clause inthe GPL, I cannot use GPL code in mojoPortal. So for example I can't distribute a release of mojoPortal pre-configured for MySql because the MySql Connector for. NET is licensed under the GPL. Note that the terms of the GPL only cover distribution, not use, so I package a separate data layer for MySql which I license under GPL to comply with the connector dependency, but the end user has to install it on top of a mojoportal package already configured for something else. Actually, there is an exception clause attached to the MySql connector that does allow it to be packaged, but my analysis is that I'm safer not doing that. The GPL does allow distribution as mere aggregation, so I can for example package the MySql connector with the source code in a single download without falling prey to the viral clause. I think in the installer project if the user picks MySql we will need to prompt with a license agreement showing the GPL.

Another GPL issue that came up recently is that I started using the ExtJs javascript library which was under LGPL, and then after version 2.0.2 they changed the license to GPL and I can no longer get upgrades and therefore no longer implementing anything new with EstJs. I removed use of ExtJs tabs and swtitched to YUI.

So, for the installer, while I think it might be ok for the installer to be GPL, I'd like to avoid it in case I'm wrong and err on the side of caution. A case could be made that mojoportal has a dependency on the installer and then the viral clause could bite me. I'd prefer to go with CPL but willing to go with even a more liberal license. CPL is not one of the listed choices on Codeplex, but if you ask them they can put any license you want. I had them put CPL there for me.

For the installer, I'd like to have the code in the same repository as mojoPortal.

Best,

Joe

Hi Justin,

Sounds good to me. I think the GPL is a reasonable choice for ReleaseIt. In any case its just a developer tool so it doesn't impact on mojoportal like the installer so as long as you're cool with the installer being CPL I think we are all set from a collaboration standpoint.

Now we can still discuss the pros and cons of licenses in general as a point of interest, but its perfectly fine if we don't agree on every point. I certainly don't consider myself an authority on the topic.

I don't see the the GPL as dangerous per se, its an important license, but I think not understanding it can be very dangerous and its easy to misunderstand it. There are a lot of open source licenses which grant various freedoms, but the GPL has a political and social agenda involved with it and it defines freedoms in a very specific way that actually limits your freedom to use it. This is why things like the Mono project are not GPL. Licenses like BSD and MIT and even LGPL give you freedom to do pretty much whatever you like, but the linking clause of the GPL coerces you to license your own code under the GPL or not depend on any GPL code. Your option 3 can only work if you don't really have a dependency (meaning your application can runwithout the GPL code or the GPL code is easily replaced). So the danger is for those who don't understand this to start developing a product they would like to sell and they depend on some GPL library which can't easily be replaced then later find they must comply with the GPL. So the danger is finding out too late about the requirements of using GPL code and finding that you can't sell your product without also giving away the source code and giving away the source code means most people will take the free code and not buy your product. If you can find a way to remove the GPL dependency then you can recover your plan and move on but it may not be easy to find or develop replacement code, it can be a big setback. So the danger as I see it is that there seem to be a lot of people who don't understand the GPL, they get the "free as in beer" part but nothing more and they think open source just means you get it free and can do what you want. The fact that it is in general true with some license that you can get the code for free and do whatever you want with it means this is more on an issue for GPL than other licenses because people have to understand more in order to not make mistakes.

I certainly don't mean to disparage the GPL, its an extremely important license (probably the most important), and in general I'm in support of the goals of the FSF but not in any absolutist way. Eventually all software may become free but giving away all of your code makes it very difficult to make a living. Sure there are a few examples of profitable open source business and I am trying to build one too but its very difficult. If I got enough donations to live I'd give away all of my code but it just doesn't happen so I need to sell some products on top of mojoportal or else go back to working in the corporate world and have less time for improving mojoportal.

Best,

Joe