OStatic

Lovd by Less touts itself as an open-source platform for social networking. And indeed, the software itself is released under an open-source license, and provides some useful functionality. However, restrictions on some of its essential plug-ins raise questions about its actual licensing status.

Social networking is one of the biggest things to hit the Web in the last few years. The phenomenal growth -- and valuation -- of such sites as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn -- has made it clear that Internet users enjoy having ways to make new friends, connect with existing friends, and communicate with them in a variety of ways.

Social networking isn't a single technology. Rather, it's a combination of several different techniques and technologies, combined such that they're all available to users at the same time. A key element of a social network is the "friend," or "connection," which indicates that people are linked in some way. Beyond the ability to add (and remove) friends, social-networking sites often offer basic e-mail-like messaging, a basic blogging tool, and a system for uploading and sharing photos.

As social networks have taken off, many organizations have decided that they, too, need to have a social network. These organizations are often uninterested in simply setting up a group on Facebook; they want to have control over the entire system, either for the purposes of integrating it into a larger site, or because they want to keep it on their own servers.

One possible solution, of course, is to use Ning, Marc Andreesen's latest venture, which allows anyone to create a social network with relatively easy-to-use tools. The problem, of course, is that Ning is a Web-based platform and service. So while a Ning-based site can be part of a company's profile, or even domain, the Ning system itself will always be a separate entity, controlled by Ning.

So it was with a great deal of excitement that I discovered "Lovd by Less" several days ago. LBL is a basic social-networking platform built in Ruby on Rails. More to the point, LBL provides the basic framework for social networking. It offers friends, blogs, photo sharing, messaging, and comments. If you want to create a social network, or just learn how to build one in Rails, the LBL is not a bad way to start.

There is one part of LBL which is unusual, however, and requires close reading: While the package as a whole is distributed under the MIT license, and can thus be used (and modified, and redistributed) however you want, three of the plugins distributed with LBL (less_authentication, less_captcha, and less_monkey_patching) are licensed only for use within the LBL application. This means that if you use LBL to create a social network, then you're probably fine. But if you thought that you could grab various parts of LBL in order to create your own social-networking software, then you will have to be careful about what you use, and how/when you use it.

There are clear open-source alternatives to less_authentication and less_captcha, although they have different APIs, and will thus require a bit of application rewriting. The less_monkey_patching plugin, however, makes many changes to base objects defined in Rails, which effectively means that they have modified the Rails API. A plugin that changes the Rails API, combined with a restrictive license on this plugin, would appear to put LBL into a gray area regarding its actual open-source license.

It's also hard to say just where the LBL application ends, and your application begins; when the plugins are licensed only for use within LBL, what does that mean if you modify LBL to create your own social-networking platform? What does it mean if you incorporate 50 percent of LBL's code into another application?

More seriously, I think that these restrictions might remove LBL's claim to be an open-source framework, despite their claim on the LBL home page. The Open Source Definition explicitly states that open-source licenses must allow for redistribution and modification of the code. Saying that LBL is open source, but that the plugins are not, especially when one of the plugins makes incompatible changes to the Rails API, seems somewhat disingenous.

It's nice to see complete applications, rather than just individual plugins, being distributed for Ruby on Rails. This testifies to the power of the Rails platform, as well as the size and strength of the surrounding community. However, the restrictive licenses on some of LBL's plugins make me wonder whether this is a truly open-source package, and what legal issues might await someone who modifies and redistributes the "Lovd by Less" software.

What do you think? Please tell us in the comments.

• Social Networks
• ruby on rails
• licensing