The Pligg sale. Do people know what they’re bidding on?

It seems that many people are not very clear about what’s for sale and not in the sale of Pligg.com.

Of course, those familiar with the Pligg history shouldn’t wonder, but it seems that the majority of people aren’t.

Let’s see.

Pligg is a fork of the original open source CMS Meneame. Meneame was released under the Affero license.

The Affero license is a modified version of the GNU General Public License. Whether you’re familiar with any of these licenses or not, the basic premise that affects this deal is that you must release your own derivative works under the original license.

In short, this means that regardless of what the Pligg team includes in the package, you will not be able to own the Pligg code, make it proprietary or hold copyright rights over the code.

Is that a bad thing? Well, that depends on what you want. Becoming the controller of an open source project is not a bad thing. In fact, it could be a very good thing. My fear is that many people simply don’t understand a thing about the license, or what they’re bidding on (as this comment proves) and the code might end up in the hands of some clueless deep-pockets ignorant that could do more damage to the project than anything else.

Let’s hope that’s not the case.

Pligg.com for sale

Mashable reports that pligg.com, the site that supports the favorite Social News CMS Pligg, is for sale on Sedo.

The minumum bid is $25,000 at this moment. But bidders beware. The CMS itself is not for sale. Only the domain, the software that runs the pligg.com site and the community behind it (about 10,000 users) is. So what you’re bidding on is a business – or the chance to start one – that gives support to a Open Source CMS.

Would Digg buy it? Doubtful. Why would they need such a thing? Any other popular social news site? Also unlikely. How about the only competitor to Pligg I know of? It doesn’t make sense to me. Some media outlet? Why would they need a developer community site? The most valuable asset of this whole thing is the software itself, precisely the only thing that’s not for sale.

Am I worried that the winning bidder may be someone who actually believe they’re purchasing the software itself? You bet! Hopefully the winning bidder will be someone who knows what they’re doing and with experience running a developer oriented website, but there are many idiots out there loaded with cash and anything could happen.