[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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