Oversights by Bluenog Spark Open Source Community Anger

The subject of open source software licensing is rarely considered titillating. More often it inspires early afternoon naps.

Well, there's been a change in the script and we've got a small civil war on our hands. Tempers and tensions have risen between US-based Bluenog and Netherlands-based Hippo — both companies deal in the content management space, both are tinkering with open source.

Now it's not the fight we're interested in — though it's been a fun interlude of Days of Our [Software] Lives. Rather, it's the principles behind the issue that are worth paying attention to.

In short, Bluenog has been accused of violating Hippo's and Apache's software licenses by using Hippo's code and not properly giving attribution. We had a chat with both parties. Here's what they had to say.

The story broke ground on Seth Gottlieb’s blog, and was followed by a flurry of comments, blog posts and tweets. In our conversations, Hippo was represented by CTO Arje Cahn. From Bluenog’s side, we had CEO Suresh Kuppusamy and COO Scott Barnett representing.

Playing with Legal Boundaries

The entire premise of this sizzling and mostly public discussion was that Bluenog, with their Bluenog ICE product, has been violating Hippo’s license terms from day one. By rights, since Bluenog's software contains Hippo's software, any Bluenog build should contain the Hippo NOTICE file. Any redistribution of the Hippo's Apache-licensed code is obliged to redistribute this file, according to section 4d of the Apache 2.0 license.

For their part, Bluenog insists that attributions have always been in the source code (which is only available to paying customers). The location for Apache License 2.0, however, is not the root folder, as you’d expect. Though according to Kuppusamy, there is a “prominent Apache license right under the Tomcat folder.”

The goal, according to Bluenog, was to avoid having multiple copies of the license, so they decided to keep just that one.

We find it interesting that in the approximately 2 years that Bluenog ICE has been shipping, no one at Bluenog ever noticed the license omission.

Not Wrong, But Not Right…So to Speak.

Bluenog reps denied most of the accusations of licensing violations in their SLA/EULA, source code, trial download distributable and on the web site, but at same time, the vendor made an effort to correct some of the issues that community members and Gottlieb had pointed out. 

For example, a Bluenog representative stated that they had “inadvertently missed” including the Hippo license in the Bluenog ICE trial download build.

Bluenog partially “rectified this in our download and we have also added more information on the Open Source Projects section of our website …”

In the trial ICE binary executable downloaded from Bluenog on July 15, 2009, there were still no attributions to any of the open source technologies or vendors in the Clickwrap Agreement/EULA that you “accept” (or not) during the install process.

The Notice file, says Bluenog, was “missed inadvertently” in the past. There is now a new folder, called 3rdPartyLicensesAndNotices containing attributions file with all dependencies aggregated there. Also, you will find the BluenogLicenseAttributions.pdf in the root ICE folder that lists Hippo and some others with links to corresponding licenses.

The SLA hasn’t changed. Being a commercial content management solutions vendor, “we stand 100 percent behind our products and none of them are licensed to our customers under any of the open source license terms.”

Cahn’s take: “It's too easy to brush aside a breach of the Apache License as the weeping of another sad open source developer complaining about others stealing his code. Let's not forget that in the end respecting licenses is an essential part of the open source ecosystem.”

comments

Useful article?

 Email It      

Follow @cmswire

Related Articles:

• Myths & Realities of Drupal
• SDL's Acquisition of Alterian: Get the Details
• Internet Explorer Regains Market Share From Firefox, Chrome

Tags: apache, bluenog, bluenog ice, enterprise cms, hippo, hippo cms, open source, open source cms, web cms

The subject of open source software licensing is rarely considered titillating. More often it inspires early afternoon naps.

Well, there's been a change in the script and we've got a small civil war on our hands. Tempers and tensions have risen between US-based Bluenog and Netherlands-based Hippo -- both companies deal in the content management space, both are tinkering with open source.

Now it's not the fight we're interested in -- though it's been a fun interlude of Days of Our [Software] Lives. Rather, it's the principles behind the issue that are worth paying attention to.

In short, Bluenog has been accused of violating Hippo's and Apache's software licenses by using Hippo's code and not properly giving attribution. We had a chat with both parties. Here's what they had to say.