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MIT style licenses provide 'snapshot freedom'. The code is a collection of text files at one point of time. GPL license is additionally a share agreement. If t

MIT style licenses provide 'snapshot freedom'. The code is a collection of text files at one point of time. GPL license is additionally a share agreement. If the code is also an valuable asset that requires constant development, update and contributions to stay alive, GPL can help with that. I would personally would prefer GPL-license under organization that can sell different licenses. If a company don't want to use GPL, they can buy commercial license and developers get money.

deleted 7y ago
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mumblemumble 7y ago
> I would personally would prefer GPL-license under organization that can sell different licenses. If a company don't want to use GPL, they can buy commercial license and developers get money. At first blush that idea makes sense, but the problem there is that we've already tried that, and it failed miserably. I think that one fundamental problem that would need addressing is how to make it not a PITA to administer, and a hassle for everyone involved: Maintainers of small projects aren't necessarily looking to embark on a proper business enterprise, contributors don't necessarily want to have to digest the implications of the license, nobody wants to figure out how royalties for contributors would work - and with people potentially getting paid directly for the software, that's going to be a much thornier issue to negotiate than it is with the "closed source derivative works" thing that you get with permissive licenses - and licensees don't necessarily want to deal with an explosion of payments to manage. I also suspect there's a sort of prisoner's dilemma from the business perspective. If we all share some permissively licensed open source projects, we can all come out ahead and achieve a very efficient pooling of development resources. If someone wants to go dual GPL/commercial, though, it may well be cheaper for me to implement my own version of the, say, 5% of some library that I actually need, than it is for me to pay a commercial license fee for the whole thing.
- appleflaxen 7y ago
  you are building a straw-man version of an unworkable payment system. it would be totally doable for the project to say 1) we are GPL licensed 2) if you can't use GPL we will sell you a license for $X 3) all proceeds go to the project. 4) if you contribute, you give us the right to do this, and retain the funds that are generated. Dual licensing really could be a silver bullet, but because nobody has done it well (for some reason people want to use MIT + commercial), nobody understands how powerful it could be.
  - mattl 7y ago
    What you described is basically MySQL's model before they were bought by Sun/Oracle.
  - kevsim 7y ago
    > because nobody has done it well I believe Qt licensed LGPL + commercial and is quite successful at it
    - narag 7y ago
      A project done >90% by a company is not the same as a more "horizontal" community project.
      - ben509 7y ago
        But they have to own the source to be able to dual license it.
        narag 7y ago
        "But"? That's exactly the difference. Most of the work is done by the company so they can do more or less what they want with the project. When there are many contributors, and significant parts of the contributions have been done by people not paid by the company, dual licensing could cause all the problems described by mumblemumble. kevsim put Qt as a counterexample and I objected that they're different beasts because Qt was developed mostly by Trolltech. Later it became more of an open project, but the dual licensing arrangement is older than that.

deleted 7y ago

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mumblemumble 7y ago

> I would personally would prefer GPL-license under organization that can sell different licenses. If a company don't want to use GPL, they can buy commercial license and developers get money. At first blush that idea makes sense, but the problem there is that we've already tried that, and it failed miserably. I think that one fundamental problem that would need addressing is how to make it not a PITA to administer, and a hassle for everyone involved: Maintainers of small projects aren't necessarily looking to embark on a proper business enterprise, contributors don't necessarily want to have to digest the implications of the license, nobody wants to figure out how royalties for contributors would work - and with people potentially getting paid directly for the software, that's going to be a much thornier issue to negotiate than it is with the "closed source derivative works" thing that you get with permissive licenses - and licensees don't necessarily want to deal with an explosion of payments to manage. I also suspect there's a sort of prisoner's dilemma from the business perspective. If we all share some permissively licensed open source projects, we can all come out ahead and achieve a very efficient pooling of development resources. If someone wants to go dual GPL/commercial, though, it may well be cheaper for me to implement my own version of the, say, 5% of some library that I actually need, than it is for me to pay a commercial license fee for the whole thing.

appleflaxen 7y ago
you are building a straw-man version of an unworkable payment system. it would be totally doable for the project to say 1) we are GPL licensed 2) if you can't use GPL we will sell you a license for $X 3) all proceeds go to the project. 4) if you contribute, you give us the right to do this, and retain the funds that are generated. Dual licensing really could be a silver bullet, but because nobody has done it well (for some reason people want to use MIT + commercial), nobody understands how powerful it could be.
- mattl 7y ago
  What you described is basically MySQL's model before they were bought by Sun/Oracle.
- kevsim 7y ago
  > because nobody has done it well I believe Qt licensed LGPL + commercial and is quite successful at it
  - narag 7y ago
    A project done >90% by a company is not the same as a more "horizontal" community project.
    - ben509 7y ago
      But they have to own the source to be able to dual license it.
      - narag 7y ago
        "But"? That's exactly the difference. Most of the work is done by the company so they can do more or less what they want with the project. When there are many contributors, and significant parts of the contributions have been done by people not paid by the company, dual licensing could cause all the problems described by mumblemumble. kevsim put Qt as a counterexample and I objected that they're different beasts because Qt was developed mostly by Trolltech. Later it became more of an open project, but the dual licensing arrangement is older than that.