The Cathedral In The Bazaar?

replicant_deckard writes "This opinion piece I wrote to Open explains how dual licensing (simultaneous use of both GPL and proprietary license) works. Dual licensing gives you basically both the support of the community and a profitable Microsoft-like business model. Seems that this model used by MySQL and TrollTech is getting more popular. Now my question is where are the limits?"

Comments

Perhaps...

[lgordon]

The author should have researched his "piece" before he had it "published." After reading the article, I found a lot of overview with nothing to say. What? MySQL has both an open source and commerical license? What are the differences? Well, maybe it's on page 2.

Re:With all due respect (how to un-shockwave ad)

[$$$$$exyGal]

I couldn't even read the article until I realized I could turn off the shockwave on the right frame by right-clicking on it, and unchecking "play". The stupid animation was way to distracting.

So to anyone else that wants to read the article (and you have shockwave, etc), please turn off the animation before you give yourself a headache ;-)

--gal

Re:The limits...

[ArsonSmith]

Most all dual licensed software is an 'or' not an 'and' license. this means that you can distribute your software as either the propritary license or the GPL license. Typically for the company to include the patches with the main product you will have to license it under the propritary one that will usually include the GPL license as the dual portion.

Inferno Possibly to be Dual Licensed

[L3WKW4RM]

Vita Nuova say in their most recent newsletter that they are considering "a dual-licence scheme that makes the Inferno software free for non-commercial use, but with a more traditional software licence for commercial use."

A quick glance at the features of the upcoming release reveals some clarification on this:

• It is available as `Free Software' (in the sense of the Free Software Foundation) if the use you make of it will also be made available on the same terms, as Free Software.
• A more conventional software licence if the result of your work using Inferno will not or cannot be made Free Software.

Inferno is the very interesting cousin OS to Plan 9 (both modern descendants of UNIX). This would be a very cool thing.

Re:How does this work?

[Otter]

Basically it's this: TrollTech writes and owns the copyright to Qt. They offer the Unix/X11 version under both a commercial license and the GPL. (Well, and the QPL, as well, but forget that for now.) If you want to use it to write GPL applications, just go ahead and do it. If you want to write proprietary software, you need to pay TrollTech for the commercial license.

This wouldn't work for Mandrake because a) they don't own the copyright on 99% of the sofware they distribute and b) most of the libraries are LGPL, not GPL, so users can write proprietary software with them anyway.

Re:How does this work?

[frohike]

So how does this actually work, legally speaking? I thought the GPL prevented code from changing licenses after being released under the GPL.

This is a common misconception about the GPL (and about copyright law in general) which we had to deal with when we were talking with some Sega folks a long time ago regarding KallistiOS.

We first published it under the GPL, which they believed meant that it could never be used in anything except GPL'd software, ever. The very next version we released an updated code base under a "new BSD" license. Everyone was scratching their heads... "How can you do that since you already released it under the GPL? I thought that was it?" The answer is that we still owned 100% of the copyrights in the code base, and we voluntarily issued a new version under the terms of the BSD license. The older version, of course, could still be used under the terms of the GPL since we already licensed it to the public.

Basically when you own the copyrights for something, you can do whatever you want to do with new versions (or the old versions, depending on how you licensed it to begin with). You can republish the same exact piece under a different license, or you can even pull back in all your new codebase and make it proprietary. The key thing is, has anyone else contributed a copyright to the work that would make it a joint copyright situation? In that case, you'd also need the permission of that contributor to make that and any future license changes.

Thus we get back to where most Free Software folks understand the situation: e.g., in the Linux kernel, there are about a billion different copyrights on it. Linus, or any one contributor, could never change the license on the kernel. They'd need the permission of every contributor to the kernel, or they'd need to get them to sign over all their copyrights. So once people start contributing to your project, under their own copyright, you can't change the license anymore. You could always rip out their code and publish your own version with a new license, of course, assuming you could distinguish who wrote what code with 100% certainty.

That's why the article's author went on a long spiel about MySQL vs Linux: MySQL retained 100% of their copyrights, so they can dual license their code base or do whatever they want with it; Linux can not be relicensed that way. If someone contributes code to MySQL AB, I'm assuming they force you to sign over the copyrights before they'll include it in their internal code base. Linus doesn't. This is also, incidentally, one of the major strengths of Linux-style Free Software -- it's de facto free forever, because one company can never make the future official versions of the project proprietary.

Take all that with a grain of salt, standard CYA/IANAL applies, but I've been studying this crapola for a while on my own :)

Anyone else find the article a tad confusing?

[Bamafan77]

Maybe I'm getting nitpicky in my old age, but this article seems to confuse several things. It often confuses free/retail with open-source/closed-source (often open source = free and close = retail, but not always.). And wrapped around all that is his confusion with GPL vs commercial customer licenses. Take the following quote for example:

Look at Scandinavia. Go to MySQL and Trolltech. Check their licensing pages and consider: They are both open and closed. They offer products for free and they sell them, just as Microsoft does. This is called dual licensing [the cathedral in the bazaar]. What's more, it works.

Does that seem a tad simplistic to anyone else? MySQL AB offers MySQL and that's it. Their money maker is both open and closed, and both free and retail(I suppose the same is true of Trolltech, but I know nothing about it so I won't comment on it). However, with MS the situation is much murkier though the author tries to paint a pretty picture. Sure they offer some stuff for free and a couple of their things are open sourced, but drawing a direct comparison between them and MySQL AB seems...strained to me. The only way such a comparison could be drawn would be if MS offered both open-source and free versions of their OS and/or Office Suites (ie, their money makers). Lumping them in with MySQL AB just because they give away their XML parser or a browser doesn't quite cut it.

Think in positive terms: Open Source business such as MySQL and Trolltech may kill the so-called piracy problem.

Maybe. But I think it's more likely that it shifts the focus to a different kind of pirate. In addition to all the guys grabbing software for free off of Napster, there are the businesses using more licenses for software than they claim and it's this group of pirates that will probably be seen as a problem.

GPL plays an important part in an innovative licensing strategy that fits varied needs. If some valuable users prefer freedom, you can give it to them.

He must mean free as in "with strings attached". ;)
Anyway, while I think open source and free software has its place, I've yet to be convinced that it can be provided unilaterally in all areas (ie provided in such a way that business can maintain the same or greater profit levels as they'd have if the product was closed and/or retail )...however, the author of this article comes just short of claiming this (but I know he was thinking it, dammit!), so I won't criticize him on something he didn't write. However it's only a matter of time before an article gets posted which says this, so I'll keep my flame thrower handy. :)

Re:This works great

[MoThugz]

It's not all roses and no thorns you know... Even with a 100% GPL/Open Source product, conflicts can exist between developers/community members that can code. Most of the time, this will result in forks of a project (eg. PHP-Nuke and PostNuke).

Now imagine a situation when one of the developers for a dual-license software who contributes actively to the product refuses to allow commercial use for his contribution. This can cause havoc to the dev process because the status of the commercial aspect of the software is now questionable.

If the particular procedure/call/parsing/whatever is rewritable by the other developers then the problem would be minimal. But what if that particular lines of code is an essential part of the end product itself, and that it is just (near) impossible to write a more efficient replacement code?

You will hear cries of "Fork! Fork! Fork!" in the background baying for blood (or code in this sense). Consider that...

Re:With all due respect (how to un-shockwave ad)

[jpkunst]

Even better: turn of Flash/Shockwave completely. I do this on Mac OS X by setting the file permissions of the plugin file to -rw------- (chmod 600). No more distracting animations, and very easy to turn it on again temporarily if needed.

JP

Re:For games?

[dnaumov]

This has (or a part of it) already been done. It's called Quake. The engine is open-source and licensed under the GPL. The artwork is copywrited so you can't go around copying the full game.

Re:Working for Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

> Take a look at the recent Safari browser. In essence Apple have taken what they could from the project, improved on it and then given back - that sounds just fine from that perspective, until you realise that the size of Apple has basically overwhelmed the small core of developers who have done the real work.

You provide an example, but this one is completely incorrect. We (the KHTML developers) were quite pleasently suprised by Apple's usage of khtml, and welcomed it completely. If we didn't want it to happen, we would have licensed it under very restrictive licenses. However, we beleive in the spirit of free software, and the idea that companies that have made millions of dollars of profits from proprietary software can be benefitted from open sourced software. Apple's contributions to khtml not only helped themselves, but are valuable to kde itself.

- mz

Re:This works great

[Eric Smith]

If a developer wants to pursue this dual-license scheme and also to accept contributions of patches or extensions from the user community, it is important for the developer to inform contributors of this up front, and to require that ownership of contributions transfer to the developer.

Certainly you can't release a piece of code under the GPL, allow an active user community to invest a lot of work improving it under the assumption that it is always going to be GPL'd, then take the result commercial. Without copyright assignments in place, you'd be liable for infringement.

Re:This works great

[Arandir]

You don't just "submit" code to a project and expect it to be included. If you contribute to a GNU project you need to sign a form transfering your rights to the FSF. If you don't want to assign your rights away, they're not going to use your code.

The same thing happens with GPL/Commercial projects. The company won't accept your submission unless you give them the right to dual license it.

If you're working on a project that has more than three developers, formal copyright assignments is Good Practice.