Preamble: I am not a lawyer, though I often wish that I had gone to law school and not business school so that I could possibly explain open source licensing and how we've somehow made freely available software as complicated as telecom. The fact of the matter is that I don't enjoy the licensing discussions but they are a necessary evil. Here is my self Q&A: Q: Why make the switch from your custom MPL to CPAL? T Preamble: I am not a lawyer, though I often wish that I had gone to law school and not business school so that I could possibly explain open source licensing and how we’ve somehow made freely available software as complicated as telecom. The fact of the matter is that I don’t enjoy the licensing discussions but they are a necessary evil. Here is my self Q&A: Q: Why make the switch from your custom MPL to CPAL? There is no negative effect on our existing users, new users or customers. CPAL is nearly the same as our MSPL so we feel fine about the switch and are happy to be OSD compliant. Subscribers get a license that absolves them from all this open source stuff anyway. Q: Why didn’t you switch to GPLv3? There are several reasons. First of all, we’re not convinced that there is enough clarity about the way our software works (typical deployments have Mule touching 2 or more other applications via many different methods like JMS, web services etc.) to be able to accurately explain how derivative works are created. There are also a host of other wacky Java/integration aspects that are not totally clear. Under no circumstance do we want to stifle adoption of the product or upset the user community. Second, we have components that are CPL and other random licenses that we bundle, which are questionably GPL compatible. Third, our legal team hasn’t had enough time to fully evaluate it–the patent part alone needs much more review. Q: What do you think of GPLv3? There are several good things—the fact that you can now mix Apache and MPL licenses is hugely helpful (though I am not convinced you can’t do it with v2) the fact that the license is not file based is all good. I don’t know that the patent stuff is great and I would say that the DRM stuff is entirely useless to me. Again, we’re at this weird stage of commerce and freedom. It’s hard to balance both. Q: Does what the OSI says matter? Good question. I am not totally sure. I do think there is value in an independent organization that reviews OSS license options but the struggle is that open source is at this crux of commerce and freedom and sad as it may be we probably need legal experts more than software developers to help define licenses. The other part is that the OSI appears to be a shadow organization (even though it isn’t) which makes it difficult to know how to deal with them. For example, when they declared war on MPL+ there weren’t any suggestions as to what the companies using these derivatives should do or a suggested migration path. That said, we got help from Mark Radcliffe, Matt Asay and ultimately from Michael Tiemann. Whether you like the CPAL or not you have to give credit to Ross Mayfield from Social Text for going through the enormous pain of getting the license approved. Of course now that Ross has suffered and paved the way we’ll probably see a lot more licenses come down the pipe that pass by much quicker. Sadly, I expect we’ll see more licenses not less. Anything else? Sure, thanks for asking. 1. Open source is thriving in big companies and governments. I can’t even believe the uptake that is going on. My guess is that we will see big companies attempting to acquire heavily starting in Q1 2008. I think by that time the proprietary vendors will start to see their revenue slip and will want to act. Stay tuned. 2. Rarely if ever do licensing questions come up. As such the majority of this post is just wasted sleeping time. 3. We are still hiring like mad. LMK if you want a sales or marketing job. Q: Why don’t you blog much anymore? Let’s start with physical ailments: it started with carpal tunnel, then the blessed baby Jebus came along and she takes up all my non-work time. Add to that 2 incidents of throwing my back out and I don’t much want to sit and type all day. I also think that cheap commentary is now readily available and am not sure I offer much else. That’s why I support what Matt is doing at Cnet—it’s much more editorial than a lot of blog crap but it also takes much more time which I simply don’t have. I also don’t feel like I have anything to prove (meaning the blog doesn’t feed my ego like it used to and still does for other bloggers.) People forget that I wrote more than full-time for three years when I was in school, consulting, blogging and contributing to a variety of pubs all at the same time. The other day I had to google myself to figure out if I had written for Businessweek (turns out I did about a year ago…go figure.) Let’s not forget that I also run this company which is growing at an alarming rate. Link: MuleSource Announces Adoption of CPAL Open Source