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

This works great

[ArsonSmith]

This is a great way for software to develop.

It allows companies to sell closed source versions of software that they develop and it also allows the community to develop changes. If the community gets large enough it may even out pace the starting company, or if there isn't much community than the company will just get all the nice security patches that open source is so good for.

Isn't the limits pretty obvious?

[GauteL]

It only works for software that is a platform for other software, which quite frankly is not the majority of software out there.

For this to be sustainable, you need lots of other companies that like your platform but wants to create proprietary software. This also means that the Free Software Foundation might not like it too much, but that is probably something absolutely everyone cares about.

I think this is great

[leereyno]

I think this is a great idea because you get the best of both worlds. You're able to sell your code to people who want to use it in closed source products AND if it is any good it gets used in open source products. The more it gets used in open source projects, the more companies there will be who come knocking at your door wanting to license it from you.

One of the main values of open source is that it provides a viable alternative to closed source solutions. You don't get stuck with whatever Microsoft or Oracle or Sun wants you to have. It also allows solutions to be custom tailored to fit a particular problem or situation. The downside to it is that it is often difficult at best to actually make money creating open source products. The people who make money are the ones who USE the products to achieve a result that would be expensive or impossible using closed source solutions. IN other words it is the customers of open source vendors who reap the biggest profits from open source.

When open source vendors dual license their products we all win. The vendors win, the open source community wins, and the companies that want to license it for closed-source work win. Everyone gets what they want and that is not a bad scenario at all.

Lee

Re:How does this work?

[DeepRedux]

A copyright owner can release code under any number of different licenses. Releasing code under the GPL does not prevent the owner from also releasing it under a proprietary license. Only the copyright owner can relicense a code; you cannot relicense a GPL code that you have only downloaded. The owner generally has to make sure that they get a proper copyright transfer to assume ownership of any contributed code.

The dual licensing model only works, as a business, when there are customers who will pay to avoid the "viral" features of the GPL. If everyone was happy to use the GPL, there would be no business in dual licensing.

Misconception of CatB

[LunaticLeo]

I am a bit annoyed by the constant mis-reading of the Cathedral and the Bazzar. ESR was originally exploring why the Linux kernel (aka the "Bazzar") progressed so fast without any published plan, nor an explicit patch inclusion process, and chaotically open mailing list. This was compared with FSF projects like gcc (aka. the "Cathedral"). Who had explict project goals and schedules, an elite group of patch committers, and a closed mailing list.

CatB is not about Open vs. Commercial (usually closed). I do grant that Commercial is nearly always closed "Cathedral"-like development. But not always. The programming language Rexx was developed in IBM in a process like the "Bazzar". This worked because IBM mainframe community was pretty big and had good communications.

So MySQL having GPL and Proprietary licencesing policies, does not make it both Cathedral and Bazzar. It has nearly always been Bazzar-like (though clearly they had fixed committers and some planning about features).

Sheesh!