I’m happy to announce that Openfire will be moving to a more liberal open source license – Apache 2.0. Apache 2.0 provides significantly more flexiblity than the GPL in virtually every way, so it should be a big win for the community all around. We expect to get all the source code headers updated for the next release. There were several motivations for making this change:
The GPL license was preventing some companies from using Openfire due to corporate policies
There was no reason to keep using GPL and end-users generally seem to prefer Apache
We’d like to encourage a broader range of commercial companies to contribute to the project and the Apache license is a good way to help make that happen
Official release would be when Jive will prepare production server for us and give all management to our hands (community). Can’t say when. Maybe it will be Beta 2 first as there were some changes after Beta 1 (there is no official download of that Beta though).
As about site, we (community) can’t do anything with that yet. Eventually i think everything will be fixed.
jdx, well, i’m not a license guru or a lawyer either, but with GPL i think you have to provide the source with your product, probably only of those parts that you have used or modified the GPL source.
Ok, so here is a question, about a year ago, we checked out the Spark code and converted into a netbeans platform module. That project has been on the shelf, but I was recently able to compile and reconnect to a local openfire server and get it up and running. Can I change those sources to the Apache license before distribution of the project?