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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: [Cc-bizcom] comments from Zack
  • Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 10:14:33 -0400

Based on discussion here, I contacted Zack Urlocker, VP of MySQL and got the following back with permission to post:

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I'm always interested in ways that licensing could be more effective.   I think the GPL is a very good license (that's why we use it) but of course it was written for a specific purpose at a point in time and I think things have changed a bit over the years.  Our philosophy or approach is different from the FSF in that we recognize that there is a case where a non-open source license makes sense.  We have some customers, like Cisco, SAS etc, who like our product but don't want to abide by the GPL, and so that's why we offer the dual license approach.  We summarize our philosophy as "Quid Pro Quo"  to mean that if you're free, we're free, and if you're closed source, we have a commercial license. 

As has been noted on your discussion boards, there are challenges with the dual license approach.  I wonder if it would be possible to have a single license that meets the needs of a commercially sustained open source development effort, like MySQL.  There are other companies that also use the dual license approach, like Sleepycat, Trolltech, OSAF etc.

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