Comments on: eBay, please allow open source in your Flash/Flex contest

By: fortune8one

fortune8one — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:46:41 +0000

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By: ebaywash

ebaywash — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:42:11 +0000

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By: Aral

Aral — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:00:40 +0000

Thanks, Sunny!

By: Sunny Li

Sunny Li — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:28:20 +0000

Hi Aral and gang,

I am happy to announce the rules have been updated to better accommodate the Flex community. Thank you all for voicing out and helping us produce better contests. We aim to make such experiences fun and rewarding. The changes to our rules are detailed in our blog post. We look forward to some really amazing entries.

http://developer.ebay.com/community/blog/

By: Aral

Aral — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 11:25:57 +0000

Great news, Doug. Happy to hear it!

By: Doug McCune

Doug McCune — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 18:29:18 +0000

So I did talk to someone from eBay and they are in the process of altering the rules to allow code with MIT and new BSD licenses. They are also going to raise the file size limit from 200k to 400k. Hopefully these changes will make it into the terms of the contest early next week. With those changes making a Flex app is actually doable :)

By: Thijs

Thijs — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:54:05 +0000

Hi Aral,

I didn’t meant to say ‘all IP’, I meant some of the IP, due to the copyright notice in the source and the credit they have to give to the authors. I expect that this very small requirement is enough for them to rule it out entirely? I was wondering why it would be excluded in the first place..

By: Aral

Aral — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:33:10 +0000

Hi Mike,

Good news! Glad to hear eBay handling this. I knew it could not have been more than an oversight.

By: Aral

Aral — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:32:12 +0000

Hi Thijs,

Allowing open source does _not_ mean that eBay loses all IP or their change to monetize the widget. It means that they do not own all of the IP — this is not the same thing.

For instance, if you use Papervision3D or the Arp framework in your project (both of which are licensed under MIT), all you have to do is leave the copyright notice in the source and credit the original authors. You can sell your amazing widget for $1,000,000,000 if you want :)

The actual license is important. Stick to using libraries that are released under MIT (or BSD) and you’ll be fine.

And eBay has nothing to lose and lots to gain by allowing use of open source libraries released under these licenses.

By: Thijs

Thijs — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:41:07 +0000

This doesn’t look like a contest, it’s more a cheap way for eBay to get as many designs as possible and eventually only pay 10k for it. The competition’s licensing terms show that by entering this competition you give all the intellectual property rights to eBay, which excludes any open source software, whether it’s MIT or GPL, because these licenses force you to acknowledge the creator’s copyright, and because eBay wants to own all of that copyright after you submit your widget, open source projects are excluded. I don’t see how eBay’s legal department can work around these open source license requirements. Allowing open source software means eBay loses all IP and their chance to monetize the widget?