A discussion of hybrid open source and proprietary licensing models.

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

There was an interesting article on Slashdot recently that accused  
MySQL of backing away from the GPL:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/17/ 
0020237&tid=221&tid=117&tid=1&tid=218

In the ensuing Slashdot discussion, I found the following post the most  
interesting:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118195&cid=9987606

"... Dual licensing is a bad idea. The only way you sell the commercial  
version is to make the GPL version unfriendly to business. Since the  
GPL was intended as a business friendly license, you're forced to  
misrepresent the GPL to sell licenses. If you want a dual-licensing  
business, don't use the GPL as the free license. Pick something that  
lets everyone know, from the get-go, that you're a commercial house  
intent on selling commercial software."

I'm not sure that a company would need to make the GPL look bad to make  
their proprietary offering look good to a proprietary developer. The  
factor that the poster (and many people) miss is that it doesn't matter  
whether the GPL version is free when you don't want to open your own  
code. If you don't want to contribute your work for free, the GPL looks  
like a bad move. You need a proprietary license in this situation.

To dual-licence code you have to own the copyright. To own the  
copyright you have to have written the code or had the copyright  
assigned to you. The FSF get copyrights assigned to them on projects to  
better defend their code against GPL infractions. So requiring  
copyright isn't sinister, and is probably the way most projects will go  
in the long term as more and more SCOs turn up.

But for a dual-licensed project, requiring copyright transfer from Open  
Source contributors is asking for free work-for-hire. It's not a  
particularly enticing proposition. And IIRC projects like MySQL  
re-write received patches to allow them to own copyright on the code.  
This inefficiency and value fire-walling prevents the Open Source  
project from reaching critical mass, and makes the Open Source project  
a drain on the proprietary one rather than an asset for the company.

This, IMHO, is the disadvantage of dual licensing for many current  
projects.

Next up I'll discuss the OGL and how a hybrid license can be a firewall  
and still build a critical mass.

- Rob.