Re: Comercial version of Swarm

[Alex Lancaster]

>>>>> "RL" == Rob Leclerc <Rob> writes:

RL>     That will be good news here for the Evolution group up here at
RL> the University of Calgary.  A member of our group mentioned that
RL> they had heard this and there was some concearn over commiting
RL> ourselves to a platform that would eventually move to a commercial
RL> project.

I'm curious as to how these rumours spread, since from the dawn of
time Swarm has been a non-profit entity.  I don't know where they
`heard this'.

Swarm is licensed under the GPL, so anybody could create a fork and
continue to develop the last GPLed version if the SDG ever wanted to
go fully commercial (which is highly unlikely given that our charter
is a charitable non-profit entity).  Remember, once open-source,
always open-source.

We have discussed in the past that a proprietary version of Swarm
might be made available under a different license for those who wanted
to incorporate Swarm into a larger proprietary product (i.e. and not
have to release their own code which the GPL would require).  The idea
being that the proceeds would continue to fund the free (GPL) version
of Swarm, which is whole point of the SDG's existence.

So, someone wanting to profit from Swarm and not contribute to the
community, would have to pay for that privilege, and hence they would
subsidise those (mainly academics and universities) who could not
afford a commercial or proprietary version.  

So if we ever did license Swarm to go into a commercial/proprietary
product, it would be to ultimately facilitate the free GPL version.

This is a model that has worked for a number of successful free
software/open source projects.

Alex
-- 
   Alex Lancaster * <address@hidden> * www.santafe.edu/~alex 
Dept. of Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley (ib.berkeley.edu) * +1 510 642-1233
    & Swarm Development Group, Santa Fe, New Mexico (www.swarm.org) 

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