January 10, 2011

Say hello to the Bad Guy! That’s me.

My pet project got to be on Slashdot for violating GPL. Definitely a bad case of the Mondays in my career as a Appnor’s CEO.

Last time my company got Slashdotted was 6 years ago when we developed an updated installer for Debian Woody, Hilux.

Over the last 8 years I have been very involved in the Open Source community, promoting OSS, publishing a book, writing articles in the local press and online media and pushing Open Source as the ultimate revolution in IT. Again, that’s me.

A few months ago, I spoke to a good friend of mine, Vasile Stanimir, who developed WinMTR back in 2000. WinMTR is the Windows equivalent of MTR, a network testing tool. Since the project was no longer being developed, I offered to buy the rights and offer it for free, on behalf of Appnor. So I bought the rights.

WinMTR became my pet project. I hired a programmer, compiled a bug and request list, and pushed hard to have a new version by the end of 2010. There were a few big things that needed fixing: working as a regular user on newer Windows releases and having a 64-bit version.

After spending Christmas Eve at work, I managed to have everything ready on December 24 – a new version of WinMTR after almost 10 years of inactivity!

One big issue was the licensing. It was my idea to go from GPL to copyrighted freeware. After 3 days (actually nights) of reflecting on it, I decided to revoke the GPL since we had full rights. There was only one external contribution, a broken patch from 2001 that got removed. Nobody went through the trouble of adding new features in a decade, but there were many feature requests. It seemed clear that people cared more about having something that works for free, rather than having it Open and maintained by the community. So, I decided to update it and make it available for free, but not under GPL.

I strongly believe that we are entitled to change the license. But to what effect?

• An angry mob. The comments on Slashdot prove that.
• A good story for our competition.
• A very long list of debates and arguments in which we have to prove that we are not creeps.

Instead of dealing with this, I decided to take the blame and do the mature thing: revert to GPL v2. By the end of the week (January 16 2011) the updated sources (stating the new license) will be on Sourceforge for all to download and further enhance.

And what does that bring us?

• A “proof” for those stating we violated GPL. Easily verifiable from the new source code.
• Fewer headaches for a tool that just had a huge increase in TCO

Hence, the lesser evil is preferred.

I have to admit that I never imagined this issue could get that blown out of proportions. If I were to lament, I’d say that we could have had a civilized discussion, instead of a one-sided story filled with incorrect “remarks and assumptions”. But I won’t lament.

Hopefully, this will make Open Source communities commit more and comment less. Maybe free software is like the ones we love: we realise how much they meant to us when we lose them or the license gets changed.

Please accept my apologies – this is not at all what I expected for the project. This goes to everyone, but especially to you, Vasile.

And thus my story ends.

Thank you,

You can spit on my Facebook Page, call me a Class A Moron but, hopefully, we can still be friends, as long as we are reasonable people.

Dragos MANAC
Alleged Wrong-Doer