Mark Hinkle is the Senior Director, Open Source Solutions, at Citrix. He joined Citrix as a result of their July 2011 acquisition of Cloud.com, where he was their Vice President of Community. He is currently responsible for Citrix Open Source Business Office and the Citrix efforts around Apache CloudStack, Open Daylight, Xen Project and XenServer. Previously, he was the VP of Community at Zenoss Inc., a producer of the open source application, server, and network management software, where he grew the Zenoss Core project to over 100,000 users and 20,000 organizations on all seven continents. He also is a longtime open source expert and author, having served as Editor-in-Chief for both “LinuxWorld Magazine” and “Enterprise Open Source Magazine”. Mr. Hinkle is also the author of the book, “Windows to Linux Business Desktop Migration” (Thomson, 2006). He is a contributor to NetworkWorld’s Open Source Subnet, and his personal blog on open source, technology, and new media can be found at www.socializedsoftware.com. You can follow him on Twitter @mrhinkle.
Authored Comments
Thanks Robin, glad you liked it.
The best response I ever saw to why someone chose a license was by Adam Jacobs who started the Chef project(http://www.opscode.com/chef/). His reasoning for choosing the Apache license was so he could include more people in his community.
He reasoned that while GPL and copyleft licenses were fine that many people for various reasons weren't comfortable with that license.
I personally like the copyleft license but I find that many companies are afraid of the perceived "virality" of the license but are fine with a BSD-style license. It may send the wrong message about giving back but for the most part the people that are going to do that would so no matter what the license.