LGPL and Licensing Freedom?

Father asks: "I'm trying to develop a cross platform alternative to ASP (Active Server Pages) based on Object Pascal (Delphi) and have hemmed and hawed for some time over licenses. I want to LGPL, but I would also like to create a commercial version (binary only) compiled from the LGPL version. My idea is to keep a register of contributors and their activity, and pay them a gratuity for assisting in the GPL version provided they post updates/fixes to my site, and they are 'accepted' for the primary distribution." Sounds like an interesting idea. Would a BSD-style license allow something like this or is the LGPL good enough?" (More)

"...I do not want to hinder other distributions, but create an LGPL product that can also help pay those heating bills. Basically I want the software to work like a journal... great good and all, but a little spare change doesn't hurt.

I know there are a host of License buffs out there on /. and I am hoping to at least get an idea as to whether I'm heading down the right road. If not, perhaps I'll just leave it at LGPL and go along my merry way.

Please help,
mike
mjohnson@davesworld.net "

Comments

You must retain copyright

[itp]

Dual licensing isn't a problem at all if you're the sole copyright holder. Ask all contributors to assign you copyright before including their code contributions, and you're free to release it under any licenses you want.

The GNU project retains copyright to all of their projects, so that (I assume) the switch to a newer version of the GPL, if and when this is necessary, is not a problem at all.

--
Ian Peters

Licence OK, what about the business model?

[Goonie]

From the question, it appears that the idea is to have an LGPL version and a commercial binary-only version. Dumb question, if the two are identical why in the world would I pay for the commercial version?

As I understand it, The LGPL lets me ( Binary-Only Software Inc) get away with just about anything if I dynamically link, or merely requires me to provide a linkable object file containing my proprietary binary(and there are tools to combine a pile of object files into one massive one, so shipping one .o file would potentially meet the requirement), as well as requiring the distribution of the original LGPL code.

Are these minor hassles to Binary-Only Software Inc. really worth paying you money? I doubt it.

With the Cygwin distribution, Cygnus uses a dual GPL/commercial licence to ensure that binary-only developers need to pay for a licence. This would probably make more sense. I realise that such a licensing scheme would make life difficult for BSD'ers, but from a revenue-generating standpoint it's the only variation of this business model that really makes sense.

Freeware

[Father]

Well, I'm not going to charge for PSP... it seems like too much ahssle and that I would cause more harm than not by trying to make money directly from it. BTW, you can downloaded Beta v.9 at Torry's delphi pages and also the Pascal Super Page! It doesn't have all the nice explainations... its a rogh cut and all, but I'm still working on it....

A few problems - Not licensing ones!

[BluBrick]

So would all contributors get an equal slice of the pie? So that the contributor who puts forth a 5-minute 2 line fix gets the same as the one who spends 3 weeks debugging a 1200 line mega-function?

Or do you plan to somehow determine the "worth" of each contributor's code? What method would possibly be fair? Lines of code? Profiling?

I think you might be asking for disputes.

Commercial Branching?

[DaveHowe]

If I recall correctly, the Netscape licence for Mozilla allows for this - a public code base, but with an explicit licence for Netscape themselves to release any "improvements" added to the public base as part of their closed-source version. The exact details are on the Mozilla licence page, but basically it falls into two groups:

1. Modifications to the existing NPL code MUST themselves fall under the NPL - and be available to Netscape for their own private use.
2. Entirely new code may be licenced under NPL or under the Moz licence (code under the Moz licence is not available to Netscape for commercial purposes)

However, as far as I know, the distiction of "what is entirely new code" is sufficiently hard to draw that most code ends up under the NPL. I am ready to be corrected on this, of course :+)
--

This is easily done

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, the copyright holder can release code under multiple incompatible licenses. So, the key thing is for you to insist that all patches be signed over to you (or, more appropriately, the company you found to handle the commercial side of things); if they won't sign the patch over, refuse to accept it. So, then the copyright holder is Widgets, Inc., and is free to release under both the GPL (or LGPL, or BSD, or Artistic, or whatever) and under a commercial license.

You can then track who gives you patches, make them shareholders in Widgets, Inc., and give them a portion of the proceeds. The key thing is to get all the code under one copyright holder, so you can then do whatever the hell you want.

For some real-life examples of this, check out CUPS and LPRng. Both release both GPLed and commercial versions, and both operate like I've suggested (though I don't believe either one contributes net profits back to patch contributors).