Ghostscript was dual-licensed, and not exactly the same as this scenario; though the end result is pretty similar. The Ghostscript folks never set a specific da

Ghostscript was dual-licensed, and not exactly the same as this scenario; though the end result is pretty similar. The Ghostscript folks never set a specific date on when the proprietary version would be GPL, as far as I know; they would do new releases of the proprietary version, and then the older and slightly less capable version would be open sourced. That's not to say calling it a time-bomb makes it an entirely novel idea. My company has been doing it for 10+ years now with Virtualmin (which has a GPL and commercial version, and we roll the commercial features down into GPL as new features come along in the commercial version, and as we can afford to do so). But, honestly, it's kind of an awful business model. We've been making a living at it all this time, but I wouldn't call it a success; we'd make higher salaries working for others. I'd like to find other ways to make a living from Open Source, that pay better (and aren't doing service contracting), but I haven't had much luck at it in 20 years of trying.