One personal project and Ra-Ajax, an interesting case
Some months ago I had an idea –ey that’s a great start for a post! Let’s better say that I thought one of my ideas was worth trying to make it real.
I thought about a community –what else, these days– of questions and answers around the best substitute for something. The idea was to organize them into categories and let people vote for the answers and popularity of the questions.
The idea isn’t extremely innovative, in fact it gets things from forums, ask.com, digg, stackoverflow and many more. But I started to see a lot of funny categories and uses.
In my case, it all started from the need of a substitute for a cooking util in a recipe I was trying to prepare :-). But it would be also very interesting to know who people thing would be the best substitute for Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones, or confirming the most popular substitute for sex is chocolate!
It wasn’t until February that I started working on it, since it’s only a project I can devote my spare time at home. But it’s ok, the main idea was not to have a great success but to demonstrate that it was possible to create something from an idea in the shortest period of time. I gave it my free time for three weeks and then let it apart until now, 3 months later. But this is another post, what I wanted to comment now is something that really shocked me today.
The people from Ra-Ajax, which obviously is the framework I intend to use in this project, have been sued. Apparently Thomas Hansen, one of the authors, worked beforehand for Gaiaware and they are suing him. I won’t go deeper there since I don’t have the details, but their framework has been removed from its website as precautionary measure.
Good news is, apparently I can use its Stacked platform as the base for my project with the LGPLv3 license, since I downloaded it before the measure. Phew!
By the way, this is my new project, substitutefor.com. A lot of changes are expected, but I decided to go public early as a motivational measure, after months of doing nothing related to it. Now I have an excuse also to publish a lot of interesting things here.
June 9th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
Howdy, Ra-Ajax is up again and being published, unfortunately we had to sign a settlement which forces us to only publish it as GPL, but at least it’s up again …
Check out the details here; http://ra-ajax.org/lawsuit-settled-the-war-is-over.blog
June 10th, 2009 at 10:07 am
Nice to virtually meet you Thomas, that’s great news! Just to clarify things, Ra-Ajax gets GPLv3 licence… and what about Stacked? I assume it was always out of the lawsuit, since Ra-Ajax is just a component of it.
I think I once read it was LGPLv3 but in google code I see it states GPL.
Cheers.
June 10th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Howdy, I found this post on Google while doing a search for Ra-Ajax in fact
Stacked was always out of the lawsuit, yes, but since we’re not allowed to publish Ra-Ajax as anything but GPL now after the settlement, Stacked in practice becomes GPL no matter what license we chose for it since it is linking in Ra-Ajax. So even if Stacked was not GPL (e.g. MIT, BSD or LGPL) the GPL of Ra-Ajax would kick in and make the end result GPL anyway. So in practice it doesn’t make much sense to have it anything else then GPL…
Still I think that GPL is kind of right license anyway for Stacked since it’s mostly something people would “use” and not “build on top of”…
PS!
Feel free to send me an email if you wish to discuss this more
(thomas@ra-ajax.org)
June 10th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Thank you for the clarification, I guess I forgot for one moment the “viral” characteristic of GPL :-D. Now everything is clear.
Every day I have less spare time so I guess I won’t be building anything “on top of” but customizing, just “use” it as you say. Anyway, great job there, I wish you good luck in this new stage
post-lawsuit.
Regards,
Jacobo Giralt.