About GPL License on Mobicents

From time to time people get doubts on the licensing terms of Mobicents and JBoss Communications Platform (JBCP), which uses a double license scheme, very common in comercial open source projects. Mobicents is free but gets restricted by GPL (except Sip Servlets, which is LGPL), while JBCP removes every constraints. With this post I will try to clarify what does that GPL means for Mobicents team and users.

Lets "talk" a bit about the GPL license, something that is never clear enough, the more you dig the more abstract it becomes. The Wikipedia page about GPL is a very good source of information, it identifies the "linking" between two software parts as a possible conflict situation, and presents different interpretations on that. In summary, if the linking is real then the software part which linked to a GPL software, must now follow a few rules, one of these is to have the source code published. In that Wikipedia page, after you read about some of the main features, starts on famous trials, A sues B, X sues Y, etc. In every case it involves a 3rd party that redistributed GPL code but either closed the sources, sometimes even hiding the presence of the GPL code, or changed the license. It can also be seen, in all those cases, that only the ones redistributing were making some kind of profit, and most refused to share that profit in any particular way.

With respect to Mobicents vs 3rd party components, we are not really able to extract if a deployed 3rd party application needs to be GPL, note that even if 3rd party code only imports Java or JSR API classes, in the end it needs Mobicents GPL code to run. Being sincere, only judges and attorneys decide the outcome, and probably some will have different interpretations too. If you ask for my personal opinion, I would say that yes it needs to be GPL, but simply because that removes all chances of being wrong! 

OK probably there is now some panic, people using Mobicents in production with closed sources or not GPL!!! Relax, there are two ways to forget about GPL:

1. You are having a benefit from it and make money. Then you should be fair, get a support contract and use JBCP instead in production. The Mobicents team does not works for free. And of course we work a lot to ensure that JBCP is the real deal, there are SLAs, there is a very successful company behind you, a company ensuring you succeed. The cost is cheaper than competition and also each case is a different case (and price), we do not want to make customers less competitive because they use JBCP. 

2: You can't pay now but you are helping improve the platform, lets be partners then, official or not, and then in exchange you get a free ride. The free ride means that the GPL linkage stuff is ignored, be it a real problem or not.  But note, no SLA of any kind.

Sincerely, we believe any good and fair usage will match one of these cases. Now what is your opinion?

Mobicents SIP Presence Service at mobicents.org

A quick update, Mobicents SIP Presence now has a section at mobicents.org, soon current docs and roadmap will be added too.

Roadmap for Mobicents JAIN SLEE 3.0

You can now see the draft roadmap for Mobicents JAIN SLEE 3.0 at mobicents.org. In summary we are going to implement the more radical JAIN SLEE 1.1 extensions, Java annotations (community discussion to start soon) and the advanced ConfigProperties idea, which should result in a very different programming model. But changes/enhancements will touch the whole platform:

• Cluster Enhancements: More flexible framework (with respect to what is used as datasource to hold clustered state), a more useful and feature rich buddy groups setup
• Resource Adaptors: JSR 309 finally, a easy to customize "example" JDBC/Datasource RA, same for a Web Services Client RA, and an alternative Http Server RA that does not relies on HTTP Servlets
• Service Enablers: continue the work started by the XDM Client, providing ready to integrate enablers for SLEE applications
• Web Console 3.x: still a bit undefined at this point, but very high chances that we will have the "old" web console back, and leave Jopr/JBoss ON just for monitoring

We have set the first Beta version for the end of January, and set all the new stuff for such release, but note that it is expected some to miss the train and jump in later releases, the task list is so big. Still, our compromise is that in the middle of the year we will have the first FINAL release, and such release will have everything production quality and carrier grade.

Finally, if you have been wanting to contribute but not able to understand how, this time is a great opportunity to step in, it's specially easy to contribute on components such as the new resource adaptors and enablers.

All feedback is welcome so please let us know what's in your mind.

Mobicents SIP Presence 1.0.0.BETA6 released!

That's right, finally a new release for Mobicents SIP Presence. Please check out the release announcement, lots of enhancements.

Join the Mobicents team!

The Mobicents team will soon count with a couple more friends. If you think you have what is needed please get in touch privately. As usual we will give priority to people which have been participating on our lovely community.

Say hello to Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.2.1.FINAL

It's out, check the release announcement, which includes download link.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE at 900 CPS!

With respect to SLEE 2.2.1.FINAL testing, I ran the usual single node SIP UAS load test, but this time it was pushed till 900cps. First time ever, there was 2.5M calls at that load without a single call failure, just a few retransmissions, memory was rock solid at 83%, and CPU at 270% (4 Cores), during that time. The test was done in the usual old QA Labs machine, compare it with the load we handled in last 1.2 release, a bit more than 200cps!

The question now is... Will Mobicents SLEE 3.x reach the special 1K? :)