KnowledgeTree Blog

The KnowledgeTree Public License

The Free Software Foundations General Public License, under which all versions of KnowledgeTree Open Source up to but not including 3.1 were released, has served the KnowledgeTree Open Source project well. Community adoption and customisation have been suitably encouraged and signification contributions ranging from functionality to bug fixes to language packs have been forthcoming.

The GPL also ensured that modifications created and distributed by 3rd-parties were made available to the open source community.

Many organisations have however expressed a desire to use KnowledgeTree Open Source in combination with their own software, modifying both applications to interoperate and thus vastly expanding the use of KnowledgeTree in to new environments.

With the KnowledgeTree being licensed under the GPL, the 3rd-party code would also need to be licensed under the same terms (which is where Steve Ballmer and friends got their much maligned “open source is viral” mantra from).

And so the hunt was on for a more suitable license for KnowledgeTree Open Source’s future. We wanted a license that was somewhat less “copyleft” than the GPL but still protected our stakeholder’s investments. Our community desired that their contributions be protected, ensuring that the entire open source code-base and derivative works of this remained open source. Our shareholders shared this desire but also wanted to ensure that our copyright and brand were protected.

We have long been admirers of the both the Mozilla Foundation and the SugarCRM company. We use both of their software products and like both their engineering and their marketting finesse. SugarCRM started out using the GPL and then moved to a Mozilla Public License variant.

The MPL, under which great product’s like the KnowledgeTree team’s favourite browser, Mozilla Firefox, is licensed, provided just what we needed in terms of “copyleft.” You may combine your own code with an MPL’ed application with no fear that your intellectual property will be “contaminated” by the other party’s license. Modifications to any source code file licensed under the MPL are however protected by the MPL and place a number of obligations on the developer. (I strongly encourage you to view our KnowledgeTree Public License FAQ for more detail).

The Mozilla Public License was not developed as a general purpose license (examples of these include the GPL, BSD license etc). References are made in places to the Mozilla Foundation and Netscape Communications. The license doesn’t take care of our shareholder’s concerns either, namely the protection of our brand. In fact, the MPL specifically forbids you from using the Mozilla branding.

And so, heavily inspired by the Sugar Public License, itself licensed out under the SPL, the KnowledgeTree Public License was born. If you have a good look at both the MPL and the KPL, you will notice that not much has changed: the agreement is now KnowledgeTree specific and an branding annexure has been added.

Well, I’m typing this on my Nokia 9300i and my thumbs are getting sore! About to land in London for 2 weeks of R&R and so my next blog entry will only be towards the end of August.