Open Source licensing woes and BSQ Sitestats
Monday, December 19th, 2005Version 1.7.0 of BSQ Sitestats is coming along well. So far, I’ve completed about 40% of the work for the new release. Finished features include:
Back-end Reporting
Now, you can look at all of the BSQ Sitestats component reports from the back-end interface. This is an important feature for webmasters who don’t have any front-end users at all. This feature has been requested multiple times and is already completed in SVN, so those of you who are project members can try this out right away.
Individual report permissions for front-end reports
This is a nice feature as you may want to show some reports to your users on the front end but not want to show others. The new Front End configuration tab allows each report to be individually permed for the Front End, giving your users only the site stats that you wish to share. Here’s a screenshot of the new configuration page:
I wish I could say that all development has been positive, but I have run into some licensing issues with the JPGraph component. For 1.7.0, I was going to include the JPGraph files directly into the BSQ Sitestats installation that BSQ Sitestats depended on and nothing more. This would have been a significant increase to the size of BSQ Sitestats, about 1 MB, but nothing compared to the 3 MB download of the JPGraph component.
Having worked as a musician and having married someone who works in publishing, I know to look at the licensing of intellectual property before using it. OSS (Open Source Software) is especially sensitive because of all of the different licenses that exist and the governments who preside over the licenses. For instance, JPGraph is distributed under the QPL License, which states that you must distribute JPGraph in its entirety. So, no 1 MB download for BSQ Sitestats users. You have to get the 60k BSQ Sitestats .zip file and the 3 MB JPGraph one. And people laugh when I say that OSS is free as in herpes….