Will the license allow open source tools or commercial tools to be developed?

Networking & Multiplayer
#1

The licensing right now appears to be geared towards letting people take the software out for a test drive. And Jeff I think mentioned that it’s highly likely that the production-level release will likely carry a license that requires commercial use to pay a fee back to Sun which rightfully seems fair to me.

With that in mind, I’m curious about 2 things…

  1. Will the future license allow open source games and tools to be developed that won’t require paying fees back to Sun?
  2. I understand that commercial games that run on SGS will likely require a fee back to Sun, but what about commercial tools? To the Tomcat example… if Sun puts all this money into Tomcat and then requires web commercial applications that run in Tomcat to pay them a fee then that seems similar to what I understand Jeff to basically be saying. But what about the guy who builds a real slick Tomcat plug-in for Netbeans, Eclipse and wanted to sell it? I’m curious as to whether or not we would be required to pay a fee back to Sun for any supporting tools that we build and try to sell.

There seems to be a distinction in my mind between games that run solely on the SGS and tools that enhance the SGS itself.

#2

So any questions you ask me about licensing really fall into philosophy. I cant tell you what the final license will look like because Im not a lawyer and the lawyers often have issues that I ma not aware of.

I can however speak to philosophy.

At the presemt there has been no discussion of trying to “tax” the tool developers nor do I think there will be. Tool developers bring value add to the base product so they already help us just by developing their tools. I’d argue strongly that we should be doign everything we can to encourage that and as little as possible to discourage it.

Open source falls into the same general space I think. Furthermore we are looking at a number of ways to enable academic and experimenal development. Its something we are keen on in the group.

#3

I think there is a significant need in the community to get a better understanding of where the SGS is heading, with regards to the license and allowed use. I know that you cannot answer these questions, but it would be very important to open a communication channel between the people responsible for these decisions at Sun, and the community.

This is because SGS looks very interesting and powerful, but at the same time no developer can afford to invest time and ressources into a technology which may suddenly become unreachable to him - due to prohibitive license prices, or due to license restrictions.

For example, some issues that come to my mind:

  • Will non-commercial, open-source projects be possible? What if they contain content that Sun considers inappropriate?
  • What if a non-commercial project wants to cover basic costs (for bandwidth, hardware) and starts to charge a small fee, or starts to sell merchandise?
  • What if a non-commercial project lives for several years, becomes popular, and wants to become commercial?

Etc. etc. I don’t expect these questions to be answered right now, but it would be important to address them eventually, and the sooner the better.

#4

Yup I agree 100%

But particualrly on things like business modles and legal agreements (and this is both) big companies have a somewhat languid pace. Trust me that everyone inside is trying to mvoe all of this ahead as fast as we can push Sun.

And the same is true for development and release schedule.