[iks-community] Fwd: Aloha Editor is out.

[Stéphane Croisier]

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 1:26 PM, Henri Bergius <henri.bergius at nemein.com>wrote:

>
> Of course, the question with both licensing and copyright assignments
> is also on where the border between "Aloha core" that requires
> copyright-assigned AGPL, and plugins that can be made by anybody is
> drawn. If everything that IKS would do in context of the semantic
> editor can happen in plugin space and be more liberally licensed, then
> I don't see a problem.
>

... But the AGPL will see some.

As far as I understand this thread, it looks like it is still unclear if
Gentics wants to adopt a dual-licensing or an Open Core approach (or a pure
community-driven approach).

I agree with you Henri. If Aloha is built from a very modular manner, it
could be great to create a marketplace of "aloha modules" which could be
available under various open source or proprietary licenses.

Then Aloha would rather follow an OpenCore paradigm by providing the core
under a very permissive license to rapidly gain a certain traction and a
momentum in the industry and Gentics (or others) could resell dual-licensed
modules/add-ons (or even fully proprietary ones if they prefer) on top of
this core.

This would make sense as basic WYSIWYG editing capabilities are already a
commodity. And some "extensions" (e.g. some grammatical checkers) are only
availabe under more proprietary licenses.  So I do not see a lot of added
values to purchase some basic editing capabilities and I would prefer to
rely on a strong community of developers to ensure the proper level of
stability/testing/bug fixing for such a core. But I do see some real
potentials to buy certain advanced "plug-ins" on a per customer need basis.

However:
1) The OpenCore business model is also subject to a lot of criticism.
Precisely defining the boundaries between what belongs to the core and what
belongs to the modules is not an easy tasks. Conflict of interests between
the community and the vendor(s) may rapidly happen. (cf: some cross-refs
mentionned here: http://stephanecroisier.jahia.com/future-of-open-source-cms)
2) Dependencies on ExtJS could be a real problem. It looks like ExtJS
considers that the viral effect of the GPL also impacts the underlying
server-side applications. This means that, if you want to integrate Aloha as
part of a proprietary CMS (or another dual-licensed CMS), you would not only
have to acquire a Gentics OEM license but also a ExtJS one (now I am not a
lawyer, so one has to legally check all these constraints)

So no ideal solution. Enforcing a real quid pro quo paradigm is not possible
with OSI licenses. I already wrote an article on this subject back in 2004
(p.20 - http://www.methodsandtools.com/PDF/mt200402.pdf ).

But an OpenCore approach with a truly permissive core (BSD/ASL) would be
perhaps the best manner to satisfy all the parties. Not sure however it is
possible to do with dependencies on ExtJS.

Cheers,
Stéphane

/Henri
>
>
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