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cc-bizcom - Re: [Cc-bizcom] An important initial question for everybody

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Subject: A discussion of hybrid open source and proprietary licensing models.

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  • From: Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: cc-bizcom AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-bizcom] An important initial question for everybody
  • Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 12:45:52 -0700

Marshall Van Alstyne wrote:
At 02:30 AM 8/20/2004, Rob Myers wrote:
Note that one goal is to create not just a hybrid, a proliferation, or dual license but a "meta" license -- a clean format with parameters like those of a software subroutine. With one set of parameters you might get BSD, with another you might get GPL, etc.

This sounds like the CC license approach. CC already describe the GPL, so possibly adding BSD and LGPL to the CC descriptions would be a better approach that reproducing them.

I'd fully support this.

I think two distinct ideas are being confused:

- A license with (more or less) variables and conditionals which can be used to generate actual licenses. The existing CC licenses may appear to be generated in this fashion, but my understanding is that they are not. CC doesn't generate custom licenses, it provides a limited set of stock licenses.

- Use of CC's coarse-grained license metadata to describe non-CC licenses (NB we already do for GPL _and_ LGPL, and Wikipedia has been publishing CC-style metadata for GFDL in its page metadata for a few months).

IIRC this isn't how dual projects work. With MySQL, QT, Berkely DB, the codebase is written and owned by a single vendor and dual licensed on the basis of this. People buy a proprietary license so they don't *have* to contribute.

Ok so far.

Anyone contributing to the Open Version knows full well their work will be sold, so is unlikely to contribute more than bug patches.

I suspect this is misleading. Are you saying developers outside MySQL AB don't make non-bug patch contributions to MySQL? And this is because people don't like MySQL selling proprietary licenses?

AFAICT the reason people buy proprietary licenses rather than contributing to the open version is so that they can sell their own proprietary software that includes code from the open project.

Your second point is actually where I think much of the meat is. Suppose we could write a license so that a person contributing to the Open Version could be confident that a 3rd party wasn't selling the value that he or she created?

I Rob's examples above a 3rd party wouldn't be selling the code, rather the 1st party (single vendor that owns the codebase) would.

Everyone could use it but no one is charging for it. Wouldn't he or she be more likely to contribute?

To an extent this is the motivation for copyleft, but rather than prohibiting commercial use, it requires the code be kept open. A simple "you can't sell the software" requirement seems really primitive in comparison to copyleft.

Another take on solving this problem might be a variant on the dual licensing approach. This would be a switch from side-by-side to before-and-after. A contribution could start life as proprietary code, becoming open after a short delay. Contributions made under the open model would always be open.

This would simply combine the worst features of both models. No sales would be made during the proprietary period, no contributions would be received during it either. This would result in an Open Source, non-commercial model but with built-in time inefficiency, reducing Open Source's efficiency in creating value.

Or there would be sales during the proprietary period to customers who need new features ASAP and there would be contributions during the proprietary period from developers who know that their code will be free in the not-to-distant future. AFAICT Artifex does exactly this successfully with Ghostscript. See <http://www.artifex.com/licensing/>.

A few developers have suggested to me casually that CC ought to have a "Founder's Copyright" project <http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright/> for software with a much shorter monopoly period. One of those developers has posted about it, see <http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?msp:8552:fjedblbemkibalcomejd>.

Marshall, are you on the Free Software Business mailing list <http://www.crynwr.com/fsb/>? If not you should check it out their archives and invite people from there to give input here.

--
Mike Linksvayer
http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21




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