Good morning,
I am glad that my post lead to what turned out to be quite a fruitful
discussion. Having used open source products for many years, this is
the
first time where I have had a serious opportunity to contribute to the
community, and it is clear that I misunderstood what the distribution
fee
was supposed to be for.
So I think I am back to the original suggestion maded by Chuck @ Tucows,
and assuming there is enough interest and support here, we're going to
license the next version under the LGPL, as is the case with the base
OpenSRS perl client provided by Tucows.
The LGPL version of phpDomain will be probably equivalent in features to
the its perl counterpart, but include some fairly major additional toys,
such as the admin interface, etc. The main thing held back would be the
multi-domain (bulk) features, as wel as the payment gateways.
We will then release the full version as a commercial product, at a cost
of about $150-250 a license, which will include all bugfixes and patches
for that version line. We will also provide consulting/installation
services.
The question is this: what is the appropriate license to use for the
commercial version so that the product is still open source in terms of
allowing the user to modify the code for their needs but not resell?
Let me also address the other questions raised by the emails both on the
list and off the list. First, I am not worried about paying for the
cost of bandwith and such as I am a webhost, with plenty available.
The problem is that I have invested considerable amount of time, energy
and money in the development of this product. We developed it primarily
for our own use, and that’s why building a viable business model with it
wasn't of particular importance at first, but as we continued with the
development, it was clear this could be a very good offering. As such
many features we would not use were added, and I'd like to see us
recover
the costs of the development, and also build a viable business model
around the actual client itself.
We can't work in a vacuum: if you guys feel this is a worthwhile
product,
speak up, give your input. Everything is on the table right now, and
its
really up to the community to say where you want this to go.
Sincerely,
)))))
Vladislav (ô ô)
---------------------------------ooO-(_)-Ooo----------------------------
--
Vladislav S. Davidzon
davidzon@thinkhost.com
Executive Director, ThinkHost
http://www.thinkhost.com
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--
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Tue Oct 19 2004 - 23:37:25 EDT