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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?"
IMO, this is OK because with Aqua (the user front end for OS X) Apple is really selling the user experience, not just a powerful tool. It's still software but the goal is different. I think of Warcraft 3: they are really selling the experience; the artwork should be proprietary, while the engine that runs it should be open. That's just what I've been thinking recently.
My company has two software products (libraries for developers). One is under an open-source license and the other is under a proprietary license. They are designed to work together, with the properietary one providing more business oriented features to complement the open-source one. Licensing of the proprietary product also funds internal development of the open-source tool.
It would be advantagous to GPL the second product, in addition to licensing it commercially. This would allow people who want use it for open-source or otherwise noncommercial projects to use it free of charge. This is a good thing, as it provides a greater user base for the product and provides marketing and testing.
My only concern with doing this is the issue of piracy. Some people/companies simply wouldn't pay $1000 for a single-server license of a product when they can simply download it and use it for free (albeit illegally). I don't have any interest in fighting piracy in cases where the product would not otherwise have been purchased in the first place, but I am somewhat concerned that smaller companies using the software on smaller projects would simply elect to believe that they are in the right using the GPL version in a commercial capacity. Obviously it would be made very clear that use of a GPL library in a commercial offering is prohibited by the GPL.
Being a corporation, a core motive is to generate a good profit, so the primary factor in this decision is which licensing policy will provide the greatest profit. I couldn't care less if the GPL/proprietary model generates twice the piracy of the proprietary-only model in the event that it also generates twice the profit.
The question on my mind is: "How many sales would I lose to people using the non-commercial version for commercial purposes?"
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
It is very common for software to be licensed under different terms. For example, one person may get an unlimited, perpetual license to use Oracle, wherease someone else may get a ten-user, one-year license. Same code, different licenses.
Similarly, one person may get a paid license for Aladdin GhostScript, someone else may get it under the AFPL, and someone else may wait a year and get it under the GNU GPL. The code may be identical, but the license defines what you're allowed to do with it.
It may be depressing to realize that you've paid thousands of dollars for something as intangible as a license, but sometimes it's called for. Opera Software, for example, doesn't want to release their browser under the GPL, so they've paid TrollTech for the right to link to Qt without distributing source.
Someone who pursues a strategy like this runs the risk that someone else will develop an improvement, without assigning copyright (i.e., create a fork). If the improvement is compelling, it can cut into the demand for the proprietary version.
This opens up some other interesting scenarios. For example, someone forks Qt from the GPL source. It would not be legal for Opera to link to that version without permission from TrollTech and the owner(s) of the fork.