A discussion of hybrid open source and proprietary licensing models.

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

Rob, this is helpful thinking on dual licensing. Thx.  In particular, the 
issue about requiring transfer of ownership of contributed code (or 
rewrite) is troubling (or inefficient).

In tracing through these Slashdot links, I also found a great discussion of 
the current MySQL license in an interview conducted by Open for Business.

From that interview, the VP, Zack Urlocker of MySQL "thinks 'the GPL is 
the best license there is' and that MySQL AB works 'closely with the Free 
Software Foundation.' On the flip side, Urlocker said the company would 
consider a different license in the future, if a better one became 
available. 'The GPL is not a perfect license ... but it is the best that is 
available.'  "

It's my hope that using theory, open discussion, and great tool building 
that we can try to figure out what such a license might look like.

MVA

At 05:57 PM 8/23/2004, Rob Myers wrote:
> 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.
>
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