3 ms·
There is an elephant in the room, and the elephant is called dual licensing. In my opinion, this is a more severe abuse of open source than what Amazon does. W
by oytis 7y ago
There is an elephant in the room, and the elephant is called dual licensing. In my opinion, this is a more severe abuse of open source than what Amazon does.
When RMS introduced GPL the idea was to make everyone share their code, and make the world a happy place full of free Software. Dual licensing abuses this sincere intent to induce fear in commercial users and make them pay.
So using a dual-licensing scheme prevents people from considering authors of SSPL the new leaders of the open-source community.
- bradrydzewski 7y agoYou might find it interesting that Stallman supports selling exceptions to the GPL (i.e. dual licensing). You can read more about it on the FSF blog [1] but the post ends with the following: > I consider selling exceptions an acceptable thing for a company to do, and I will suggest it where appropriate as a way to get programs freed. [1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions
- oytis 7y agoOK, if RMS approves it, it's not an abuse, who am I to argue? Still, the goal of open-source, copyleft and permissive flavours alike, is to "get programs freed", not to establish a fairer distribution of the cash flow. So when someone introduces a new superrestrictive license and starts selling exceptions right away, their earnesty can naturally be questioned.