Merchant's Edition v1.9.2

[Traumflug]

A new version of Merchant's Edition was just released:

Github

Merchant’s Edition wishes you good business.

[30knees]

Nice! I saw that you implemented thirtybees's bug fixes etc. Do bug fixes also go from Merchant's to thirtybees?

[datakick]

5 hours ago, 30knees said:

Do bug fixes also go from Merchant's to thirtybees?

No. That would be too big of a hassle. I believe that we can't just cherry-pick single commit, because that would violate license agreement. We would have to also copy all copyrights and attributions that @Traumflug added to the original thirty bees files (thus transforming them to Merchant Edition). Thirty bees source code would actually become derivate work of ME. That's just silly to me.

Merchant edition can cherry-pick our changes, because this fork is already derivate work of thirty bees, and because we mostly didn't change copyrights notices in the header files. Once we add a new copyright notices, or other attributions, to the source code, he will have to copy these as well together with the cherry-pick, even if the commit itself don't contain these notices. He would be breaking the license agreement otherwise. 

Traumflug has decided to run his own spin-off of thirty bees, as anybody is entitled to do so. I'm not happy about it, but what can I do. We will, however, not allow him to advertise his fork on our servers anymore.

[Traumflug]

14 hours ago, datakick said:

That would be too big of a hassle. I believe that we can't just cherry-pick single commit, because that would violate license agreement.

Uhm. You could just pick them and be happy. Every commit mentions the author in its description, license problem solved. Merchant's Edition takes care to keep this authorship while picking, thirty bees can certainly do the same.

Copying code from one open source project to another under compatible licenses is perfectly legal and often exercised practice.

If such practice makes you grumpy you might want to remember where you base your own work on. thirty bees inherits tens of thousands of lines of code from PrestaShop. Tens of thousands of lines of code in vendor/. Thousands of lines of code written by Michael Dekker and, well, me. Half of the recent bugfixing work was donated by users. You got all this for free.

Open source projects don't distinguish by ownership. Open source projects distinguish by distributed feature set, by target audience, by secondary services.

Edited April 12, 2021 by Traumflug

[30knees]

Unfortunately, I don't understand the technical intricacies about introducing code from each fork. Independent of that, I feel cooperation would be better (assuming Traumflug doesn't want to contribute to thirtybees (and Merchant's Edition) and earn his money as an established partner and contributor).

[datakick]

11 hours ago, Traumflug said:

Uhm. You could just pick them and be happy. Every commit mentions the author in its description, license problem solved. Merchant's Edition takes care to keep this authorship while picking, thirty bees can certainly do the same.

Copying code from one open source project to another under compatible licenses is perfectly legal and often exercised practice.

No, it's not that simple. The license give specific rights. You can't just open any open source code and copy this line or that method. It is intellectual property of the author, and using it without the consent is very much illegal. Being it an open source, author granted anyone rights to use the code, but also put a condition on the usage.

And in this case, OSL3.0 stipulates that anyone can use such code as long as they retain attribution:

Quote

6) Attribution Rights. You must retain, in the Source Code of any Derivative Works that You create, all copyright, patent, or trademark notices from the Source Code of the Original Work, as well as any notices of licensing and any descriptive text identified therein as an "Attribution Notice." You must cause the Source Code for any Derivative Works that You create to carry a prominent Attribution Notice reasonably calculated to inform recipients that You have modified the Original Work.

As far as I understand that, I can copy any part of the code, as long as I retain any all all copyrights notices in it. The question is the scope - if I copy 1 method from some file, do I need to copy all copyright notices in that file only, or do I need to copy attributions from all files? I don't know. But I definitely don't want this hassle. 

If thirty bees (and merchants edition) was released under MIT license or similar,, I would definitely have no problem cherry-picking code from Merchants Edition. But since it is released under OSL 3.0, it's definitely not that easy. 

 

11 hours ago, Traumflug said:

If such practice makes you grumpy you might want to remember where you base your own work on. thirty bees inherits tens of thousands of lines of code from PrestaShop. Tens of thousands of lines of code in vendor/. Thousands of lines of code written by Michael Dekker and, well, me. Half of the recent bugfixing work was donated by users. You got all this for free.

I don't know what you are trying to say here.

I don't pretend that we own the thirty bees code. We don't. It is an open source. I know it's a collection of contributions from lots of authors, and hopefully each contribution was valid under the license. 

The way I see it, standard contribution model is perfectly in line with licensing agreement. When somebody forks the thirty bees repository, they create derivate work. They implement the change, and create pull request.

• If fork doesn't contain any new attributions (copyrights notices and such), then it's perfectly fine to merge such PR to the parent project. Because it already contains all copyrights that is present in fork. Similarly, it's perfectly valid to cherry-pick any code from the fork.
• If the fork contains some copyrights that are not in the parent project, than it's fine to merge the PR as long as it contains all the new copyrights notices
• If fork contains some new copyrights notices (as merchants edition fork does), and PR does not contain these, then merging such requests would be illegal under the OSL 3 license, and infringing on intellectual property of the author. The same applies for cherry-picking. It would be perfectly fine under the MIT license, though.

I understand that you love open source, and you probably hate all this legal nonsense. But the legal stuff exists and should be respected. 

Open source does not mean that anyone can do to whatever they want with the code. Everyone can do only what license allows them.

This is a good example of how important it is to choose proper license for a project. I'm really sad thirty bees is under OSL 3.0, but there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. Guys at prestashop decided that long time ago.

[Traumflug]

On 4/13/2021 at 12:21 AM, 30knees said:

Unfortunately, I don't understand the technical intricacies about introducing code from each fork. Independent of that, I feel cooperation would be better (assuming Traumflug doesn't want to contribute to thirtybees (and Merchant's Edition) and earn his money as an established partner and contributor).

Well, you read it. All the commits were offered, which certainly counts as contribution. The response is no no no, and a lot of excuses.

At this point it's probably pointless to discuss this further. Merchants have to decide for them selfs whether they want a distribution coming with all known bug fixes or a distribution coming with only the bugfixing subset originating from thirty bees.

[30knees]

11 hours ago, Traumflug said:

Well, you read it. All the commits were offered, which certainly counts as contribution. The response is no no no, and a lot of excuses.

But what about commenting on the reason that the copyright notices you introduced apparently make the incorporation of your code illegal? Not infringing on your copyright (and perhaps messing up how thirtybees can be forked) does not sound like an excuse to me but a very wise decision.

Edited April 15, 2021 by 30knees

[Traumflug]

On 4/15/2021 at 2:28 AM, 30knees said:

But what about commenting on the reason that the copyright notices you introduced apparently make the incorporation of your code illegal?

There is no such reason, no idea on where you picked this up. Merchant's Edition is just as open source as thirty bees, which includes coming with the same license.

[30knees]

On 4/13/2021 at 2:00 AM, datakick said:

If fork contains some new copyrights notices (as merchants edition fork does), and PR does not contain these, then merging such requests would be illegal under the OSL 3 license, and infringing on intellectual property of the author. The same applies for cherry-picking. It would be perfectly fine under the MIT license, though.

@TraumflugI picked it up from here.

[Traumflug]

Then you have to ask the person doing such claims. For example, why he thinks thirty bees can copy from PrestaShop, but not from Merchant's Edition, while all three come with the same licenses.

[30knees]

13 minutes ago, Traumflug said:

Then you have to ask the person doing such claims. For example, why he thinks thirty bees can copy from PrestaShop, but not from Merchant's Edition, while all three come with the same licenses.

@datakick 🙂 It would be super to clarify this so we can work together instead of separately.

[Beeta]

On 4/13/2021 at 8:00 AM, datakick said:

• If fork contains some new copyrights notices (as merchants edition fork does), and PR does not contain these, then merging such requests would be illegal under the OSL 3 license, and infringing on intellectual property of the author. The same applies for cherry-picking. It would be perfectly fine under the MIT license, though.

 

@datakick help me to understand, so the problem is that thirtybees don't want to add merchant edition's copyright in tb files? or it will accept them as long as the PR contains merchant edition copyright?