This is the question we are being asked too often. If you are looking for a quick answer, here it is: Please don’t remove Oxwall reference from your site. We wouldn’t like you to do it even if you offer money.
Now, some background. From the very start we
thought it was important to be really ‘open source’. What does it mean
and how is it different?
The problem is the term is severely abused. You
can see a lot of companies (including social software) putting ‘open
source’ tag on their work but actually using it as a marketing ploy.
Some of them go as low as encrypting/obfuscating source code to prevent
easy removal of references and selling “licenses” to remove those
extended backlinks, clearly created to annoy site owners.
And the “business model” seems to work. A lot of
people think they need to make an impression that they build their
websites themselves. C’mon guys, if governments use open source software
for their websites, do you think it’s a shame to acknowledge you do the
same practical and honorable thing? I can smell the anti-competition
rationale here but people should understand that software has nothing to
do with the ability to run communities. There must be a reason why
Facebook still haven’t been eaten by “competition”?
People falling for this meme enable
pseudo-opensource companies do what they do. However we believe this is
not what open source stands for and not how it should make money to
support development.
It is not accidental that we use CPAL license.
It’s less restrictive than GPL, for example, because it doesn’t make
you release any derivative works under the same license. With CPAL you
can keep your version closed, include it in larger works, sell your own
distributions, fork and relicense, whatever.
We don’t want to restrict your benefits from our
work, nor do we want to impose hidden costs on you via marketing tricks.
It’s just that we give you results of our hard work for multiple years
in exchange for you helping us spread the word.
Oxwall reference is small, unobtrusive and
designed to not make you want to remove it. It is one of a few ways to
promote free software. If you got a lot from Oxwall and feel like giving
back, please help us with that.
Although we reserve the right to let somebody
rightfully remove the required reference, the reasoning shouldn’t sound
like “hi, I want to remove your link because… I don’t like it there”.
Thanks for creating with us!
