[Cc-bizcom] comments from Zack
Marshall Van Alstyne
marshall at MIT.EDU
Mon Sep 13 10:14:33 EDT 2004
Based on discussion here, I contacted Zack Urlocker, VP of MySQL and got
the following back with permission to post:
Begin quote ---------
I'm always interested in ways that licensing could be more effective. I
think the GPL is a very good license (that's why we use it) but of course
it was written for a specific purpose at a point in time and I think things
have changed a bit over the years. Our philosophy or approach is different
from the FSF in that we recognize that there is a case where a non-open
source license makes sense. We have some customers, like Cisco, SAS etc,
who like our product but don't want to abide by the GPL, and so that's why
we offer the dual license approach. We summarize our philosophy as "Quid
Pro Quo" to mean that if you're free, we're free, and if you're closed
source, we have a commercial license.
As has been noted on your discussion boards, there are challenges with the
dual license approach. I wonder if it would be possible to have a single
license that meets the needs of a commercially sustained open source
development effort, like MySQL. There are other companies that also use
the dual license approach, like Sleepycat, Trolltech, OSAF etc.
End quote ---------
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