South Africa-based open source document management project KnowledgeTree released KnowledgeTree Open Source Edition 3.5 under the OSI-approved GPL v3 license Wednesday, replacing the prior “KnowledgeTree Public License” for this and future versions.

In his in-depth blog post about the license change, KnowledgeTree COO Daniel Chalef explains the thinking behind adopting GPLv3. Some key elements include:

“Firstly, we wanted a license that would be widely accepted by our community and the open source community at large. We did not want to risk the license we were using to be, over time, relegated to the peripheries of the open source world. We wanted to use a license that would have wide acceptance and momentum behind it. What this would mean is that our community would fully understand their rights and obligations around utilizing the software and would not be dissuaded from doing so because they felt they would need to undertake a lengthy and costly legal exercise to determine if they could use our code …

We’ve also matured our thinking, built out our community, learnt a lot more about our business and now believe that a strong copyleft license is more appropriate for us: it is far more friendly to an open source community and far more likely to dissuade commercial use of the code in circumstances where profit is involved.”

I was struck by this forward-looking and common-sense approach. Speaking for the “customer” side, IT managers considering an enterprise-class open source solution for use inside the company firewall find the intricacies of some open source licensing terms can turn a simple product selection decision based on features and cost into a mind-numbing analysis of dense and often ambiguous licensing legalese.

Acknowledging that easily understood terms for using open source applications benefit both the “customer” and the “contributor” communities demonstrates a clear vision of what’s important for the advancement of open source and the success of enterprise projects. Congrats to KnowledgeTree.

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This entry was posted by Ryck on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 12:08 am and is filed under Community, Enterprise open source, Licensing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.