Re: Licensing - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy
From | Chris Travers |
---|---|
Subject | Re: Licensing |
Date | |
Msg-id | 423A68EF.8000904@metatrontech.com Whole thread Raw |
In response to | Re: Licensing (Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org>) |
List | pgsql-advocacy |
Christopher Browne wrote: >That's an excellent commentary on the issues. > >I'll poke at the "business friendly" bit a little bit because it seems >to me that things are a _little_ more complex than that. > >The approach MySQL AB has taken with its "dual licensing" (I love to >call it "dueling licensing" ;-)) is, in fact, quite "business >friendly." It's just that the only business that it happens to be >particularly friendly to is MySQL AB. Ditto for TrollTech and Qt, and >Sun and OpenOffice.org. > >The "GPL + Traditional License" approach that MySQL AB is encouraging >is compatible with the notion that the "market" will consist of a >single software producer with exclusive ownership of the code base who >then sell it into a traditional style "proprietary" community of >customers/consumers. > >Unfortunately, in order to be able to operate under the dual licenses, >this presents the necessity that one party has exclusive ownership of >the application code. That requirement of ownership prevents the kind >of "community participation" we see with PostgreSQL, where there are >numerous contributors working for numerous organizations. > > Ownership is not strictly speaking required. Digium, for example, does not require that contributions to Asterisk are assigned to them, just that the author gives them a license under BSD-like terms (which they then relicense under the GPL and their own proprietary license). The difference is that if I hand over my copyright to you, I am no longer allowed to distribute my work as part of another product, but if I license it to the company under a permissive license, I still retain all rights to it. >People are often willing to sign over copyright to an organization >that operates in some form of "public interest," wherein you can see >MANY contributions that have gone to GPL-licensed software where >copyright is held by the non-profit "Free Software Foundation." > > Completely agree. It is a worse form of subsidizing the competition is than normally found in the BSD community (think FreeBSD v. SunOS) ;-). At least there the idea was that academic projects should support a wide range of economic approaches. With copyright assignment, one is essentially *giving away their rights to rerelease the code under other terms* while giving those rights to a competitor. Note, I pick on FreeBSD for subsidizing their competition, and I realize that FreeBSD was originally comfortable with this idea. So the observation is more an economic one than a practical one. OTOH, projects like Apache or PostgreSQL might subsidize their competition, but the competition will rarely have any chance of superceding the main project in terms of user base. >There has been, in contrast, a distinct paucity of willingness to >donate code to "dueling licenses" organizations. Unlike the FSF >projects, you _don't_ see a lot of code coming in from outside. > > Personally, I see dual-license as a worst-of-both-worlds approach. You usually turn away good people who might otherwise make a contribution, and you end up competing with your own free products. Not a good solution. It can be done well (I think that Digium does a good job with Asterisk), but that is a special circumstance partly mandated by the fact that some standard telecom codects (G.729 iirc) are pretty heavily encumbered under patents, so there is a real market which is incompatible with the GPL. Best Wishes, Chris Travers
Attachment
pgsql-advocacy by date: