A discussion of hybrid open source and proprietary licensing models.

[Marshall Van Alstyne <marshall AT MIT.EDU>]

At 03:45 PM 8/20/2004, you wrote:
> Marshall Van Alstyne wrote:
> > At 02:30 AM 8/20/2004, Rob Myers wrote:
> > > 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.

This sounds more like what I was thinking.

> > > > 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>.

Mike thanks for this.  It's exactly the kind of thing we have in mind to 
model to see what tradeoffs would work.


> 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.

I'll go check this out and invite folks to join. Good input.  Thx.

MVA