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Monty Suggests a Business-Friendly License That Trends Open
An anonymous reader writes "Want to gain some of the benefits of open source software development but not sure how to finance it? According to Monty Widenius, creator of MySQL and MariaDB, one solution could be the 'business source' license. While 'open source friendly' rather than open source, Monty blogged, it is intended to offer a viable alternative for companies that want to 'do development and compete with closed source companies on similar economic terms.' Business source starts out with similar benefits as an OSD-compliant license: the source code is visible and can be used freely by all but a small segment that has to pay (the developing company chooses the segment). Then, after a few years, the license automatically changes to an open source license. Monty recently explained the details of business source, and gave a sample license. (Oh, and not to worry, he notes – MariaDB is and will remain GPL.)"
Why would the shit themselves? Qt was dual licensed under GPLv3 and commercial for years before the LGPL option was added and the FSF didn't make a sound.
If you had read the article you would have noticed: "I truly belive that Open Source is a better way to develop software." But Open Source is not always practical for a business. He's proposing this as a more open alternative to Open Core, not as a more closed alternative to Open Source. At least that's my impression.
And...
>copyrights and patents that can be deferred just about forever.
No idea where you're taking that from. It's a fixed time period stamped on the file, it's not forever.
I think this is the licensing model Android uses without calling it that way. Google give access to the code only to to their partners, they develop features in their private repository, then after the first device ship, the code is properly pushed to the public repository. Everyone has access to the code at that date, but non Google partners are at a market disadvantage, they will be late (theoretically because some OHA members are slow to release new releases than non members)
'do development and compete with closed source companies on similar economic terms.'
Or, you know, we just keep doing what we're doing now, which is providing high quality software that's well documented, easily maintained, available to the public for free, and hated by capitalists so much they've sent the IRS after every organization that supports it searching for it's hidden pirate treasure to turn over to the greedy.
Look, let me put it in terms you can understand: If your company is losing market share to a bunch of people who do this for shits and giggles in their spare time, maybe you should be polishing up your resume instead of bemoaning the situation. I mean, that's the free market at work, right? Why are you trying to interfere with the free market Monty?
Stop trying to negotiate with capitalists. They don't undertstand... they're like dinosaurs: They can't see it unless it has a dollar sign on it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Whippersnapper. Ghostscript was the original program to do that. The current version was closed source but the old versions were GPL.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The only reason GNOME exists is exactly because the FSF objected to the Qt license. See Stallman on Qt for some history there.