Komodo in violation of Mozilla Public License?

[Tim Churches]

Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters wrote:
> 
> ActiveState Corporation <http://activestate.com/> produces an
> multi-language/multi-platform IDE called Komodo, which is based on the
> Mozilla framework.  It is a nice product, overall, based on my tests of
> the (free) betas.  In the last week, ActiveState has released Komodo
> 1.0, with a dramatically changed (commercial, for-money, and by
> subscription) license.  In particular, their Release Notes
> <http://activestate.com/ASPN/Reference/Products/Komodo/relnotes.html>
> state that:
> 
>   Educational license - Komodo is free for educational and
>     NON-COMMERCIAL purposes.  If you're using Komodo to learn to
>     program, this is probably the one for you.
>   Evaluation license - Komodo is free for evaluation purposes, to test
>     Komodo's features for a short time before full deployment.
>   Commercial license - Any other use of Komodo must be under the
>     commercial license.  This gives you full access to regular software
>     updates and the full power of integration with the Knowledge
>     Center.
> 
> While IANAL, and all that... doesn't this look like an awfully blatant
> violation of the Mozilla Public License (which covers the codebase in
> Komodo)?!
> 
> Yours, Lulu...

Dear Lulu,

The same unlovely thought occured to me, as I'm sure it did to many
others. But then I thought, surely a relatively large (in free
software/open source terms), well-established firm like ActiveState
wouldn't make a fundamental **legal** mistake like violating the letter
of the Mozilla licensing agreement, so I suspect that they are using
some obscure loophole in the license or have done a deal with AOL or
whoever owns the copyright to the Mozilla codebase to re-license it on a
commercial basis. It would be great if erstwhile free software/open
source Python hero David Ascher could enlighten us regarding this issue.

So, although it is unlikely that ActiveState has made a large legal
blunder, I suspect that they may have made a big marketing mistake by
trying to sell Komodo under a commercial license. Whatever the legal
niceties, it grates. Also, Komodo is clearly non-free in the
non-monetary sense - the source code for it may or may not be available,
but clearly the commercial license precludes anyone from freely
extending or improving it or from borrowing sections of code for use
elsewhere in the best free, open source software traditions. I suspect
that ActiveState unconsciously know all of this, which is why they added
the clauses to the licensing terms (I can't find the actual license on
their Web site) about it being "free" for educational and NON-COMMERCIAL
purposes (their caps). Alas, such terms are always unworkable because
there are so many grey areas at the edges of "educational" and
"NON-COMMERCIAL". Some examples: a university uses Komodo to develop a
billing system. That's "educational" because the billing system supports
the provision of education to fee paying students? Of course it is,
isn't it? A large financial institution hires an apprentice programmer
and equips him/her with a copy of Komodo. That's educational because the
programmer is just learning his/her trade. Certainly, I think. A
government department deploys Komodo on all its programmer's desktops.
That's NON-COMMERCIAL because this particular government department
doesn't charge end-users for the services it provides. OK. At least
hardly any of the services. Oh. But it does contract out its team of
Komodo-using programmers to work on projects for other government
departments. Hmmm. I'm sorry, but such "educational" and non-commercial"
licensing terms are unworkable. It would have been infinitely better for
ActiveState to have licensed Komodo under a free (in every sense)
license and then charged for support contracts. That's fine. Now I'm
sure that ActiveState will protest that it cost a lot to develop Komodo
- they had to pay lawyers to work out a way round the Mozilla license or
to buy an alterantive license from AOL or whoever, and they had to pay
David Ascher and the rest of the Komodo team's salaries. Otherwise
Komodo wouldn't have been so feature-rich. My attitude is that a less
feature-rich, (initially) buggier product which is free in the FSF sense
of being extensible and modifiable is always preferrable to a (still
somewhat buggy) feature-rich but non-free product. 

So I'm sticking to emacs and Idle, and hoping that ActiveState sees the
light over the licensing of Komodo, because I'd love to be able to use
it myself, but most importantly, deploy it wherever I go as a complete
Python programming environment.

Cheers,

Tim C
Sydney, Australia

PS Christmas Island (.cx) is only a short swim across the Timor Sea from
the island of Komodo in the Indonesian archipelago. Perhaps you should
pay the Komodo team a visit and straighten them out.
TC


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