Re: [Fsfe-uk] Accounts

[Robin Green]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 02:16:37AM +0100, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 12:17:44AM +0100, Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> > Where can one find good docs on dual licensing?
> 
> I don't know of any dual licensing docs, it's not that big
> a subject.  Dual licensing is just offering two licenses and
> letting the user decide which one to be bound by.

With ANY dual licensing scheme it's essential to ensure that all contributions
(long enough to be copyrightable - i.e. a one line change doesn't count)
are licensed under both licenses. (If one of the licenses is Apache license and
the other is GPL, then at least if someone sends in a patch under the Apache
license then you can convert it to GPL+Apache because there's nothing in the
Apache license preventing you - but the reverse does NOT follow!)

If you don't get this confirmed from all contributors, you can no longer 
continue to 
distribute the code under both licenses. Or you have to reject those 
contributions
from people who don't agree to the dual licensing.

Also, if you are selling proprietary licenses to companies (like Hans Reiser
of Reiserfs does) and giving the same code away under the GPL, then 
contributors may not
want you to profit off their hard work, and thus they may decide to license
their contributions under the GPL only. Again, you can't legally distribute 
their work
under the proprietary license, because the GPL forbids it. You end up with two 
different
versions, and the bizarre situation of having to reinvent the wheel if you want 
to incorporate
ideas from the Free version into the Proprietary version!

(Obviously by contributions here I mean actual code and data contributed to the 
software, such as bugfixes or artwork - not mere ideas. Ideas aren't 
copyrightable.)

In practice, I don't think many people are against, say, Mozilla's dual GPL/MPL 
licensing
(actually it's triple licensing IIRC, with the NPL thrown in too). So dual open 
source
licensing is probably not that big a deal. But as I said above,
some coders might reasonably object to you profiting off selling their 
contributions.

So, I would recommend against dual GPL/Proprietary licenses - even if companies 
beg
to be allowed to choose a proprietary license!! Just say no. It will avoid 
hassle -
and worse, the temptation to steal Free code and illegally stick it in the 
proprietary
version (a not unheard of occurence).
-- 
Robin

Governments do not exist to provide lucrative contracts for proprietary software
developers.