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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: Marshall Van Alstyne <marshall AT MIT.EDU>
  • To: cc-bizcom AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-bizcom] An important initial question for everybody
  • Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 12:33:07 -0400

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





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