[Koha] Liblime, Koha, BibLibre and FLOSS

[Paul Poulain]

MJ Ray a écrit :
> What with all the flaming of LibLime for hosting lock-in, I didn't
> expect that other Koha vendors weren't making at least that promise
> already.  So - would the other vendors like to state their current
> contract permissions?  Anyone else want to follow the co-op and
> BibLibre and make this promise to your buyers?
>   
If the contract says nothing about providing source to *hosted* client 
there is a loophole.
Because GPL + SaaS + specific code + unreleased code is legal (well, no 
one objected anything. And maybe we could/should investigate if it's 
really legal. But I think so)
So instead of saying nothing we decided to *explicitly* exclude this 
possibility. We never planned to do that (ie: fork a non open-source 
version), but with updated contracts, we contractualy exclude this 
possibility. And, you know, what is written in a contract can't be 
discussed. What is not written can. Now it's written for BibLibre, our 
clients are protected. No changes in the promises, just changes in the 
contracts.

In your contract, you say it's written : "

grant permission to the Buyer to use, copy, modify, adapt or
enhance the material supplied in the performance of the Services, so
far as [the co-op] is permitted to grant that permission"

but... in a SaaS, you don't provide any material to your customer. So, you have the "juridic loophole" as we had.

of course, for non hosted libraries, one provide material, so you/we must release the code under GPL. but (and that's the trick with LEK), for hosted libraries, one provide no material.

About:

> Also, what about the data?
We already explicitly say : "datas are your's, you can get the SQL dump at any time".

-- 
Paul POULAIN
http://www.biblibre.com
Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc
Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08