A discussion of hybrid open source and proprietary licensing models.

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

Rob Myers wrote:
> One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is how Open Source made MySQL
> commercially viable. I certainly wouldn't have started selling a new
> database at the moment when Oracle and Microsoft were consolidating
> their stranglehold on the market in the late-1990s. Without Open
> Source, MySQL would not have got the mindshare, exposure and community
> of users required to make it commercially successful.

In this case there's even a counterfactual: in the mid-90's mSQL (free 
as in beer for most purposes, source available) was popular for low-end 
web apps on unix.  Hughes Consulting of Australia (the mSQL vendor, 
IIRC, I'm offline at the moment) didn't want to open source mSQL, and 
over a very brief time (~1996) saw their share killed by MySQL.  Now 
MySQL is a thriving business.

I like PostgreSQL better, and it appears to have corporate-financed 
development with a non-copyleft (BSD-like) license, but that's another 
story that I don't know much about.

--
  Mike Linksvayer
  http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21