Even I believed what you said. But the thing is lets say I contribute something in EPL, lets say wake on lan binding, and tomorrow I want to make money out of tricky feature like custom magic packet, it becomes very hard for me to prove in courts that I was the one who created the original work and the EPL branch of that work is “just a branch”. The courts assume that I picked up EPL code, modified it for premium features and I must disclose my source. You see, I am the original developer, but I am still getting the bad fame and “being an ass” card from courts here.
If you follow the Eclipse, Eclipse Smarthome, and OH process, every PR requires a “signed off by MyRealName: MyRealEmail@address.com” and it requires signing the intellectual property rights of the software over to the Eclipse Foundation.
So if you merged your deleted WOL binding into the core, you wouldn’t own it anymore anyway. But we would have full documentation of the fact that the code was signed over to the Eclipse Foundation by Ganesh.
If you have some tricky feature that you’ve implemented on top of Eclipse Licensed code and have kept that code private then it’s a simple matter of comparing the open source code with the closed source code to see where you added to it. If your source code is open sourced, then there is nothing in the Eclipse Licence preventing a competitor from using the same code you signed the IP over to the Eclipse Foundation in their own products.
And if you are worried about being sued, well, you don’t own the contributed code and the Eclipse Foundation offers it with no warranty or liability.
So I don’t understand this scenario. Maybe the laws in India are incompatible with open source software development.
I don’t think this is true: Eclipse Contributor Agreement | The Eclipse Foundation
This ECA, and the license(s) associated with the particular Eclipse Foundation projects You are contributing to, provides a license to Your Contributions to the Eclipse Foundation and downstream consumers, but You still own Your Contributions, and except for the licenses provided for in this ECA, You reserve all right, title and interest in Your Contributions.
Thats exactly the part that scares me and my firm. You people assume that when I give you formula that 2+2=4, you claim your copyright on it. My position is the formula that we gave you is a “just an open source branch” of that work. 2+2 might lead to 5 in certain scenarios, that we don’t want to open source. But here by contributing to EPL, we are being jeopardized of our own did, suddenly the eclipse foundation is claiming 2+2=4 is our idea, we own it, and all derivations of it must adhere to EPL. Thats unfair, we gave it to you in the first place.
Ok, I misunderstood. Thanks for the clarification.
No, when you open source code, you are giving everyone in the works the right to use your code in almost any way they see fit. That’s the Free part in Free and Open Source. If that scares you you shouldn’t release anything open source.
Anything that relations closed source remains fully under your control, with the EPL. If you use a license like GPL, then if your closed source depends on GPL code, it too must be released under GPL. EPL let’s you keep the closed source closed, even if it depends on EPL code.
Hi Metin, Ando & Tim,
Congrats on founding your company, it is great to see people being passionate about openHAB and even decide to do a living on it!
Let me just comment on a few things. I am not meaning to de-rail you in any way, but to make sure you are following the right tracks. Note that IANAL, so don’t take that as a legal advice, but rather seek professional legal assistance for questions that you might have to clarify.
Let me first point to this comment that I made a few years ago. In short, I see two ways of building a business wrt openHAB:
- “Around openHAB”: Provide pre-packaged versions, bundled with hardware, professional services (installation, setup, maintainance, etc). Effectively, you are not selling openHAB (or a product at all), but you are offering services for it.
- “On top of openHAB”: You build a product (software and/or hardware) that you are selling and for which you have to provide warranty, support, etc. and in which you are using code from openHAB. Most likely you will restrict the software, so that people are not able to do everything they read about here in the forum, because you wouldn’t be able to provide warranty & reliable support anymore.
So (1) is clearly about openHAB as a solution, so it is fine to use the “openHAB” name, refer to the discussion forum here for support and in general help to grow the community, because the efforts make openHAB accessible to a wider audience.
For (2), my clear advice (as mentioned in the linked comment) is to build a product based on Eclipse SmartHome (not calling it “based on openHAB”). The result will be a solution similar to openHAB, but still different to it - as you will have your own user-friendly setup UIs, a constrained set of supported add-ons, etc. As you can see here, there are already such offers on the market. Ideally, such solutions should contribute their improvements back, so that everyone else (including openHAB) benefits from it. As an example, the vast majority of the code of the Paper UI is a contribution from QIVICON in order to have the possibility to do setup&configuration through a UIs. Without this, openHAB would most likely still be fully driven through textual configurations only.
From what I understand, OMNI-Q falls into the (2) category. It thus does not directly address the openHAB community, but rather wants to build a customer base of non-technical users, which might be partially sourced from the openHAB community (so effectively removing them from openHAB, while keeping them in the “ESH-based solution” user group). It is a solution similar to, but not identical to openHAB. It would imho perfectly fit in the list of ESH solution references.
If you like, we can discuss this all over a beer at the next Smart Home Day in Ludwigsburg - I hope you are joining it as well and I’d love to see your hardware prototypes then 
.
Regards,
Kai
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Hi everyone,
Thank you so much for your valuable contributions! I’d like to give you some insight about how we see it.
Of course, we have considered the open source and licensing questions before we decided to go openHAB. As we see it, there is no questions in that we put back any bugfixes and enhancements that we may make in the “core” of openHAB. However, when it comes to additional software, it is compliant with the license on one hand, but also necessary, on the other hand, for us to keep some of our code closed, at least for a while. This would probably apply to at least parts of the improved UI that we put on top of openHAB.
And yes, there is indeed a gazillion of legal requirements to be considered when offering a hardware device. For us (being software guys), this is the hardest part, but we decided to accept the challenge and go through it. If it was so easy, everyone would do it! 
We are very proud and happy that the reception of our idea in this forum is so positive. Thank you, guys!
Metin
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Hi Kai,
Thank you for your thoughts. Yes, you are right, we want to go for (2), at least in the long run. However, to be honest, we’ve been discussing the differences between ESH and openHAB, and we thought we’d understand it, but I’m not 100% sure. As I see it, our initial approach is actually about openHAB.
We will definitely be there (by chance, our office is in Ludwigsburg) and would love to discuss with you and everyone who’s interested!
And yes, we’ll be excited to show our prototypes!
Cheers
Metin
David, thanks for the offer. At the very moment, I guess the best you can do is to contribute to openHAB which will help us as well.
We can start to amplify our development once we know if we got the order from the crowdfunding backers. Give us some two more months for this.
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Excellent, see you there then! Btw, I just published the registration page (will do an official annoucement soon), so feel free to be the first to register 
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Mission accomplished? 
Yes!
I agree with you and @hilbrand on interpretation of EPL. My requirement still remains un-aswered, maybe I need to revisit lawyers. I am confused a little bit. My question to lawyers will be around combining APL and EPL together. The Kotlin-ESH infrastructure and most of the libraries we will be contributing there, I am still not sure it should be APL or EPL. The Kotlin and Android communities contribute primarily in APL. I wouldn’t wanna get into trouble re-licensing some of their core work under EPL. The APL allows doing anything with the code. Its so confusing. There is jail time of 6 months for violating copyright laws here in India. I don’t want that.
Thanks both for clarifications though.
Hi @metin,
cool stuff and nice that you want to such a way.
Maybe we can assist you with your thoughts, as we at home-iX use highly modified ESH partly in a commercial offering (not directly B2C) and we are from Stuttgart/Ludwigsburg
I am at the SmartHomeDay and maybe we find some time to exchange…
As general feedback: In your case I see ESH as the better path. Keep in mind that openHAB might have SW that breaks intellectual property by reverse engineered protocols. So there is a big big difference between DIY users and selling a solution to endusers.
Also you need to know really good about opensource SW licence models. Cause open source != open source and always tve same cae.
BR Mehmet
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@MARZIMA, sorry for the delay, but I haven’t got a notification or I overlooked it.
I’m definitely looking forward to chat with you at the Smart Home Day! As you are more or less around the corner, we might even meet earlier?
The Kickstarter campaign has now launched.
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@david, thank you for spreading the word!
We’d be excited, if you guys would share our projects with friends who might be interested to support our idea and get one of our OMNI Q smart home centrals.
Also, any feedback from your side would be appreciated!
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Unfortunately, the Kickstarter campaign did not reach the goal we needed to start production. We are now evaluating other funding options or alternative approaches. I’ll post an update here when we know more!
I just read that statement and FTR I’d like to clarify a little bit so that other people don’t misunderstand something. In the context where the statement was made, it’s kind of true, but standing alone, it could may lead to a wrong picture.
EPL is, just as GPL, a Copyleft license. If you redistribute openHAB in any form (shipping a device where it’s pre-installed is definitely a form of redistribution), you must provide a copy of the source code to all recipients. You have to do this disregarding whether you changed the source code or not. The source code provided must be exactly that one the installed version was built from. In case updates are shipped via internet, the source code of that updates has to be provided as well.
By the way, EPL is not so long and you don’t have to be a lawyer to understand the text. I tell everybody all the time, don’t be afraid to just read legal texts, many of them aren’t so hard, you just have to read carefully. EPL is very clear:
If a Contributor Distributes the Program in any form, then:
a) the Program must also be made available as Source Code [..] and the Contributor must accompany the Program with a statement that the Source Code for the Program is available under this Agreement, and informs Recipients how to obtain it in a reasonable manner on or through a medium customarily used for software exchange [...]
but be careful: According to EPL, a “Contributor” is not somebody who changed the source code (as you may would assume), but
“Contributor” means any person or entity that Distributes the Program.
Coming back to the context of the original question
the following statements can be made as a conclusion:
- A clear “No”. Open Source is about access & rights on the source code of a software you get, it’s not about releasing software. EPL does not force anybody to release a software.
The next points are about the question whether the source code has to be made available publicly, given the assumption that the UI is already released or shipped to somebody. - The source code of a commercial openHAB UI does not have to be provided if it is not a derivative work or fork of an existing EPL-licensed openHAB UI (e.g. PaperUI, BasicUI, HABPanel, …). So if someone does a completely new UI and writes 100% of the source code on his own, he’s fine. But as soon as significant parts from an EPL-licensed UI are copy & pasted, the full UI has to be provided as source code under EPL.
- “Provide the source code” does not mean that it has to be made publicly available for everybody. A hardware distributor does not have to do that. He just has to ship it together with his hardware (or offer a private download link for all buyers). But any recipient is allowed to upload this source code publicly under EPL.
Of course, I’m not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
ditto
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