9 ms·

Dual licensing GPL for fame and profit

114 points by george3d6 6y ago

geertj 6y ago
The common solution to the ‘contribution problem’ inherent in dual licensing is a CLA. That never really appealed to me. It makes it harder to accept occasional contributions, while I also find it somewhat dubious to ask people to transfer copyright to a for profit entity without paying them for the work they did. One thing I wanted to try, but never really got to, was to ask contributors to license additions to a GPL project under the MIT license. These can be shipped under the proprietary license. As long as the original authors continue to do a large part of the work, most code remains GPL preventing proprietary forks and safeguarding your proprietary revenue model. [edit: clarity]
- pornel 6y ago
  > ask contributors to license additions to a GPL project under the MIT license I do this, and contributors are fine with it. Commercial licensees don't mind complying with a combined commercial + BSD/MIT license.
- l3s2d 6y ago
  In this scenario, how do you track which parts of each file are GPL and which parts are MIT?
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > In this scenario, how do you track which parts of each file are GPL and which parts are MIT? All the code is GPL. The contributions are dual licensed to the maintainer as GPL+MIT, which means that the maintainer can relicense them as they please, just like the code they own the copyright for. So other than minor formalities like maintaining a list of copyright owners, the maintainer can continue to release both GPL and commercial versions unimpeded. Keeping track of which lines were contributed in this way going forward isn't really necessary (although a note in the merge commit would be prudent). The main practical difference between a CLA and actual copyright assignment is when you are suing a violator. At that point it is a bit simpler if there is one copyright owner, rather than asking other copyright owners to join the suit, but it is important to realize that they don't have to join the suit for it to go forward (in fact, every copyright owner could sue the violator independently if they wish). Only when you are the copyright owner of a minority of the software's source code (IOW most of the source comes from contributions) do things get inconvenient in terms of a violator possibly being less motivated to negotiate with you (although that would actually be really stupid on their part).
- kemitchell 6y ago
  Echoing others: There's nothing wrong with taking contributions to a copyleft project under compatible permissive license terms. That said, CLAs usually include protections that permissive licenses don't. For example, CLAs often require the contributor to guarantee they have the rights to license their contributions, and didn't lift code from someone else without proper permission. Anecdotally, CLAs are also just better licenses, in terms of legal implementation. Especially when it comes to patent rights, though no license can completely eliminate patent risk.
amedvednikov 6y ago
I agree with the author and think it's a great model.
_ph_ 6y ago
Dual licensing is a very fine method to make code available as open source and keep it a commercial product too. The GPL is a license which has worked for this, QT is a good example. This works best, when the dual-licensed software is the large part of your product. When using the GPL, it comes at one huge disadvantage: you cannot accept community patches to the GPL software and use them for your closed-source branch. This is the incentive for companies, to use a more permissive license for some of the software. They can reintegrate community contributions into their closed software product. Of course, this only works out, if the closed software product adds significant value over the open sourced part, or no one would buy it.
- doomlaser 6y ago
  What do you think would be the ideal license for the open source part of this dual license model?
  - _ph_ 6y ago
    I think, and I tried to express that with my post, there is no one ideal license. It completely depends on the situation. If, like QT, the library is your whole product and you do not depend on the community for contributions, then GPL is great. It forces vendors of non-GPL software to acquire a commercial license, while open source projects can use your product without restrictions. If it is not your core product and you want to encourage community contributions, BSD and MIT might be the license of your choice. You cannot prevent other companies from using the software, but neither are you prohibited of using any community contributions in your product.
- auggierose 6y ago
  How about making your own contributions GPL, and the contributions of others either under a CLA, or under MIT license otherwise?
  - matkoniecz 6y ago
    Many people are unwilling to sign CLA. I wanted to submit patch fixing blatant and ugly typo in README. After I got notification about requirement to sign pages of legalese I switched to doing something else and decided to never contribute to this project in any way.
rocqua 6y ago
How does dual licensing work with 'downstream contributions'? If some user finds a bug in your GPL code, fixes it, and pushes that code to your repo? You don't own the copyright to that bugfix right? So how can you re-license it under a commercial license? What about meaningful improvements instead of bug-fixes? I can see a bugfix being trivial enough. But if someone works hard to improve performance, and then some other company starts selling that work without compensation for the original author?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I believe what usually happens here is a CLA that gives the project owner the right to relicense that contribution.
- george3d6 6y ago
  > How does dual licensing work with 'downstream contributions'? If some user finds a bug in your GPL code, fixes it, and pushes that code to your repo? > You don't own the copyright to that bugfix right? So how can you re-license it under a commercial license? The way we do it in my project, and the standard practice for Apache (where we copied it from), is tohave a CLA that gives full rights to the original owner for any patches people want to PR. > What about meaningful improvements instead of bug-fixes? I can see a bugfix being trivial enough. But if someone works hard to improve performance, and then some other company starts selling that work without compensation for the original author? This is a bigger problem, but in practice I assume it wouldn't happen because if someone were to actually put in weeks or months of work into significantly improving the project, why wouldn't you just hire them or pay them ? After all, the whole assumption here is that this is a model for a for-profit endevor.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > The way we do it in my project, and the standard practice for Apache (where we copied it from), is tohave a CLA that gives full rights to the original owner for any patches people want to PR. How do you handle that in practice with the many different law systems around the world, do you just not accept contributions from countries where authors legally cannot transfer all rights?
echelon 6y ago
> It's a nice compromise for moving towards a more open world, without having to live in Stallman's communist utopia. I'm going to go a little off topic here, but I think Open Source is being taken advantage of and needs to push harder. We've forgotten the warnings of Stallman. AGPL does a decent job against hosted services. It's a shame cloud companies have co-opted various open source database and server products and ceased contributions back to the world. With the same hand, they lock people into their managed versions. Another thing we need to fight against is providing software to companies that put users into walled gardens. We need licenses that require data export and right to forget. Encode the GDPR into our licenses. Finally, we have to fight back against embrace, extend, extinguish. Apple is trying to take over computing and prevent us from running our own code on our own devices without going through their store. We should prevent them and anyone else trying to do this from using our software. There's a lot we need to defend or we'll all wind up using opaque thin clients to access walled silos.
- emteycz 6y ago
  Yes, this is the correct way to fight Apple and such (even though I don't think they are a threat to open source). Don't let them use the software if they don't want to do it our way, just like they don't let us use the hardware if we don't want to do it their way.
- chappi42 6y ago
  > Another thing we need to fight against is providing software to companies that put users into walled gardens. We need licenses that require data export and right to forget. Encode the GDPR into our licenses. Don't like walled gardens either. But imho the "fight against" should be done by (more flexible) political regulation and not by (rather inflexible) software licenses.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    I don't understand why should we work hard to get all (or half, but that's still billions) people in the world to do this if we can simply write it into the license terms and use the already existing legal framework made exactly for this purpose. I also don't understand the claimed inflexibility, IP rights are one of the most flexible pieces of legislation I know, and your license can be as flexible as you wish too. On the other hand, what in the hell is flexible about laws made only for this purpose?
saagarjha 6y ago
From an entirely moral perspective, dual licensing GPL never really felt right to me. You’re basically giving the people who are the most likely to not care one bit about the license an “out” where they don’t have to respect it anymore. If you claim your project is GPL but I’m using an device with some derivative of that project’s code in it but I can’t get the source, then I’m not getting the benefits of it being GPL. Really, I think the title is the best explanation of this strategy: you want companies to pay you; you don’t really do this if you care about the freedoms that GPL is meant to preserve. In this case the only purpose of using the GPL is that it scares big companies into paying you and lets individual projects use it for free.
- george3d6 6y ago
  > you don’t really do this if you care about the freedoms that GPL is meant to preserve I mean, if this was the case, why provide the source at all ? Or why make it free to use forever ? Why not release it under a license that states usage is only permitted as long as the author allows it, i.e. for a limited trial period ? My point here is that you can be pragmatic and say: If some people want to build a free world, fine, I agree with that idea in principle and I will provide my work to them for free. On the other hand, most people want a paid world, which is also fine, I might as well provide my service to them as well and benefit from it. You're not doing as much as releasing stuff under GPL-only would, in that you're giving people that pay you an out, but it seems to be better than nothing. Plus, it's a more positive approach than GPL, in that it's not actively "hurting" people that don't want to join the open source community (by not providing them any option to use the product), it's simply giving an advantage to the open source users.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > On the other hand, most people want a paid world, which is also fine, that's where there's gonna be some disagreement
    - jka 6y ago
      Slightly tongue-in-cheek, perhaps: the people who benefit from a paid world might want a paid world, while they might also want to continue to reduce their costs.
Fnoord 6y ago
Who pioneered this? Was it TrollTech with Qt? (Author mistakenly calls it QT.) Or actually FSF themselves? A disadvantage is that it goes against collaboration of people who don't profit from the proprietary version. They need to dual license their contributions by assigning their copyright to the organization (as FSF also requires). How many people refuse to collaborate as a result of this?
- raverbashing 6y ago
  The company is now called Qt Group https://www.qt.io/company https://www.qt.io/company
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    I know Qt changed ownership (including being bought by Nokia). Qt Group for sure did not pioneer it as they didn't exist in the 90s. Not the same company as TrollTech. Were they the first with dual licensing FOSS and proprietary though?
    - phonon 6y ago
      > Not the same company as TrollTech. Yes it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company
      - Fnoord 6y ago
        Seems like it, legally. I stand corrected.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I think this model is quite fair to upstream, anyone that isn't willing to pay for their tools gets the same treatment for their own projects.
- kemitchell 6y ago
  The canonical "founding father" of free/open software dual licensing among FOSS wonks is L. Peter Deutsch, of Ghostscript fame. His companies ran a number of business models in their early days, dual licensing among them. The canonical "popularizer" is probably MySQL AB, followed by Trolltech/Qt. These days, Open Core is riding high. Dual licensing also had its day, and may again. The more general pattern of "free under these public terms, else pay us" for software goes back far further. Mosaic and Navigator were early Web-enabled examples. Before that, some "shareware" traded on physical media was feature-complete and unlocked, but license-limited, on the honor system. Outside of software, in other media covered by copyright, the model is old as the hills, and far older than the Free Software movement. Especially with noncommercial terms for free use.
vortico 6y ago
We (https://vcvrack.com/ https://vcvrack.com/) do this and it works great for us and our users. Wouldn't give up the licensing scheme for the world. We'll soon release a proprietary fork (Rack for DAWs) of our GPLv3 software (Rack) as a new funding source. It's the perfect funding scheme and has no major disadvantages. The author makes profit from a fork of the software, which requires/causes the GPL version to be actively maintained (since new functionality and bug fixes of the proprietary fork often derive from modifications of the GPL software). And the user has a choice of using the open-source/free software, which they can freely run, review, modify, and share, or purchase the proprietary software. By Economics 101 theory, a "trade" is always mutually beneficial if the user's intrinsic value of the software is greater than the purchase price. As mentioned by others, we can't accept patches to our GPL software without a contributor license agreement (such as a paid contractor position), so make sure you're aware of this before choosing the dual-GPL/proprietary scheme for your own software. This isn't a big concern for us because in my personal experience, a patch that actually saves me time in the long run is very rare (See Quality section of https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/blob/v1/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/blob/v1/.github/CONTRIBUTING.... You get what you pay for.) But I'm perfectly fine with doing everything myself or through hired work.
- polytely 6y ago
  Just want to say thanks for working on VCV Rack, it made modular synthesis accessible to the masses and I have gotten a lot of joy out of it. Keep up the great work!
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  Off topic, but I'm wondering if you have any plans to have some kind of demo functionality for your commercial plugins? For instance adding them to your account for an hour, or have everything have a demo scene where they're functional but you can't modify connections or add modules (just play with the knobs). I checked out VCV rack when it was posted to HN the first time, and it seemed like a cool toy at the time. I'm blown away by the ecosystem that's built up now. Absolutely phenomenal.
  - 6y ago
pjmlp 6y ago
I also think this is the best approach, it allows for commercial use, and anyone that doesn't want to pay for it, gets the same commercial benefits as they are willing to give upstream.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
I'm probably stating the obvious, but GPL licensing (AGPL, even) hasn't worked so well for MongoDB, Redis, and many other projects/products in these times of SaaS. In fact, the proliferation of SaaS business models can be seen as a direct consequence of the abundance of F/OSS software.
- auggierose 6y ago
  I wonder if this couldn't easily be fixed by using this license: https://opensource.org/licenses/NPOSL-3.0 https://opensource.org/licenses/NPOSL-3.0 It is open-source, but disallows commercial for-profit use.
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    Idk I thought the problem isn't so much self-hosting by end-users (commercial or not) but "cloud vendors" able to provide services build by others in aggregations and at price points those others can't meet, precisely because of their development costs.
    - auggierose 6y ago
      As far as I understand the NPOSL-3.0, cloud vendors would definitely count as for-profit, and therefore not be allowed to use the software, even in an aggregated way. They would have to obtain a separate license.
      - tannhaeuser 6y ago
        Yes, but the sweet spot for many services is the ability to offer hosting while allowing self-hosting, free dev licenses, and third-party integrations. It's a particularly good no-brainer sales story to contrast with self-hosting dominated by admin/HR, and possibly hardware/data center costs.
        auggierose 6y ago
        I guess this spot is not so sweet when Amazon "self-hosts" your software. So you need to make up your mind.
Const-me 6y ago
Good article, but there’s a point missing. GPL incentivizes people to creates web apps instead of desktop or native mobile apps. This way they can reuse GPL pieces without open sourcing their derived works. Developers are probably OK with that, they can charge monthly fee for a SAAS, also it’s easier to develop software for just 1 hardware configuration + one web browser (or a few browsers if you support mobile). However, as an end user, I prefer native apps. They don’t require internet connection. I’m in full control over my data. Native apps are often faster, even smartphones have rather high count of these GFLOPs in both CPUs and GPUs, even when the servers are fast and over-provisioned, network latency often kills the performance.
- phoe-krk 6y ago
  Yes, this is a hole in the GPL. Use AGPL as appropriate to solve this.
- saurik 6y ago
  Which is kind of why the GPL should probably be obsoleted by the AGPL (or even something much stronger, that makes the situation with services being constructed out of libraries and then used two levels indirect more clear).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wffurr 6y ago
  GPL is hardly the primary factor driving web over native. A true write once, run anywhere, frictionless install, no gatekeepers platform has a lot going for it.
  - Const-me 6y ago
    > A true write once, run anywhere Despite I never worked on modern web apps, as a user, I don’t believe it’s true. I observe broken web apps more often than desktop apps. Browsers are incredibly complicated these days, the APIs they expose to developers are less stable than APIs exposed by operating systems. The internet between frontend and backend is a huge source of bugs (latency, end-point security, packet inspection in enterprise, public routers using custom web-based authorization forms). Some web apps collect their dependencies in runtime from all over the Internets and become broken when these third parties update something. > frictionless install For mobile platforms or UWP it’s equally frictionless. Windows desktops have ClickOnce, and even with traditional MSI installers clicking “I agree-next-finish” only causes minimal amount of friction. > no gatekeepers platform Right, on mobile that’s a very good reason :-(
jitendrac 6y ago
I also support dual licensing the projects. It allows companies to release reasonably good part of their product in public domain, while still catering the needs of enterprise clients. Mostly they also release some part of awesome enterprise features in gradual timeframes. we can fork and release community versions according to our needs(respecting IP and trademarks of company). We can also contribute upstream changes by dual licensing our contributed code with GPL and to their proprietary contributor license. My favorite projects following this route are Redhat/CentOS, MySql/MariaDB and Virtualbox.
boltefnovor 6y ago
I understand the dual license idea. But why does it need to be GPL? Why not dual license MIT/BSD plus a commercial version with more features?
- Etheryte 6y ago
  This is addressed in the article, if you license your software as MIT, whoever uses it is in their right to do essentially whatever they want with it, including using it for profit without paying you a dime. The idea with dual licensing with GPL is that the user has to either open-source their code, which most corporations will not want to do, or use the paid licensing scheme.
  - boltefnovor 6y ago
    Has that worked in the real world? I know some companies have had their software nabbed by other companies..... did they not use GPL? I guess I’m thinking of elasticsearch but surely other companies have been turned into services by big companies?
    - eitland 6y ago
      Certain companies have complained because other companies made a profit from selling hosting of their (A)GPL software. This is totally OK with the (A)GPL which is why certain companies has tried to come up with new licenses, none of which are compatible with OSI Open Source. (I specify OSI Open Source here since someone took the time to dig out enough references to convince me (and probably others) that the term open source was used more or less for the same idea well before OSI started using it.)
      - Etheryte 6y ago
        For anyone interested in this in more detail, [1] and [2] offer good examples and context. [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html [2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/2127313/1470607 https://stackoverflow.com/a/2127313/1470607
boltefnovor 6y ago
Is there anything a like license that would prevent cloud providers turning my software into a service they sell? And at the same time is fully open for usage that does not sell it as a service?
- Macha 6y ago
  AGPL is the closest but arguments abound over whether it covers orchestration/deployment layers. And there's nothing saying they won't just reimplement your service (see AWS DocumentDB).
delusional 6y ago
Cool article. I like the topic, and I think it makes some fair points. I do have to question the use of the quote from GNU, because it doesn't engage with the GPL where the GPL is. The GPL is not a guide for how to create a software project that survives. It's not a license optimized towards maximizing funding for project. The GPL exists as a tool to protect the 4 essential freedoms. It's possible to have long and boring discussions about how Linux would have turned out if it had been MIT licensed, but they've been had before. for GNU, the GPL, and the FSF, it's clear that if your project can't survive while protecting the users 4 freedoms, then it does not deserve to exist. If you want to engage GNU and the FSF (and supporters of either project) in a discussion about dual licensing and the GPL, the 4 freedoms have to be central. It's not an engineering discussion, it's a moral and ethical one.
symisc_devel 6y ago
At PixLab, we believe this is the right approach to license SDKs & C Libraries. We did this with our embedded Computer Vision Library (https://pixlab.io/downloads https://pixlab.io/downloads) and it did works quite well. Corporations really hate anything GPL related and will ultimately purchase commercial licenses at high cost to get rid of GPL if they are interested enough in your product. Note that dual licensing was first popularized by Sleepycat software makers of BerkeleyDB now absorbed by Oracle. They were profitable during their short lifespan thanks to this approach.
jordigh 6y ago
Stallman was hesitant but in favour of this. He called it selling exceptions. His reasoning is that selling exceptions merely permits someone else to create non-free software, but that weak free licenses like the MIT license already allows this, therefore, selling GPL exceptions wasn't worse than weak licenses, in his view. https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions bkuhn has had more first-hand experience with it. It's been disastrous. The way exceptions are sold are by scaring copyleft users with frivolous copyleft violations and offering them no recourse to correct the violation except by buying a non-free license. Oracle and Mongo are the most famous examples of vendors who bully their users with threats of copyleft violation, telling them the only way to correct the violation is by paying. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  I read the whole thing waiting to get to an example of what a "frivolous" violation is. I probably agree with him or her but it does hinge on that and it's an important detail to leave out.
- Proven 6y ago
  Stallman did some things right but doesn't understand freedom. How is this dual licensing (with GPL 3.0 at that) different from selling proprietary s/w licensed to the buyer together with its source code? GPL 3.0 means one has to release changes made in-house to the s/w whereas a proprietary license would free them from that _obligation_. For many users a non-OSS approach would work much better and be cheaper too (no legal BS, no need to review changes and release them). Tiny minority (those who'd fork it under GPL) would prefer Stallman's way, but it's easy to see how Stallman's "freedom" wouldn't work for 95% of users...
- kemitchell 6y ago
  Best short summary of Stallman's published position I've seen. Nice. I also have first-hand experience with selling exceptions. My experience has differed markedly from Bradley's. Lots of small companies sell exceptions without any aggressive, professional, commission-driven sales team. Many publish helpful guides and FAQs on their licensing situations that clear up confusion about the (A)GPLs. Some have chosen new or different public licenses, in much plainer language, to avoid that confusion in the first place. For what it's worth, I remember reading Bradley's secondhand report of shakedowns by MongoDB. I've never worked directly with MongoDB, either, but I was surprised. What I've heard from MongoDB employees is very different: they spent a lot of time sending out "comfort letters" clarifying that people could use AGPL Mongo in their applications without releasing the whole shebang. I don't think Mongo sends such letters to competing cloud providers. When it comes to proprietary cloud providers, I thought the point of AGPL was to demand cloud users share alike or leave AGPL code alone. I think Bradley and I would probably agree that big companies have given dual licensing a bad name. But we might agree they've often done the same for permissive licenses, too. I don't think little companies, especially little companies not Hell bent on becoming behemoths or getting acquired by them, deserve the bad rap. From a business point of view, small companies are precisely where dual licensing matters. Oracle-scale companies can well afford to develop and manage differentiated open/community and enhanced/enterprise projects. If they're selling exceptions for the whole codebase instead, it's likely either dead-end code they don't want to invest in, or they're up to something else, leveraging their other BigCo advantages.
pornel 6y ago
I did this for some of my projects and it worked quite well. I think it's a nice balance between supporting free software community, and avoiding being a sucker who does free labor for corporations. Financially it works orders of magnitude better than asking for donations or individual patronage. Corporations operate on a completely different scale of money.
ignoramous 6y ago
> Why can Google develop TensorFlow? Because they can make a lot more money from selling/renting TensorFlow optimized hardware. Joel said it the best (in 2002!): Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements. ... Headline: Sun Develops Java; New “Bytecode” System Means Write Once, Run Anywhere. The bytecode idea is not new — programmers have always tried to make their code run on as many machines as possible. (That’s how you commoditize your complement). For years Microsoft had its own p-code compiler and portable windowing layer which let Excel run on Mac, Windows, and OS/2, and on Motorola, Intel, Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC chips. Quark has a layer which runs Macintosh code on Windows. The C programming language is best described as a hardware-independent assembler language. It’s not a new idea to software developers. If you can run your software anywhere, that makes hardware more of a commodity. As hardware prices go down, the market expands, driving more demand for software (and leaving customers with extra money to spend on software which can now be more expensive.) Sun’s enthusiasm for WORA is, um, strange, because Sun is a hardware company. Making hardware a commodity is the last thing they want to do. Oooooooooooooooooooooops! https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ Highly recommended reading it. This blog post gave us right framework to be able to decide which components to open source without worrying about licenses (we have used Apache and Mozilla Public License so far for different projects). Also, enforcing GPL has turned out to be not straight-forward? If you intend to make money then open sourcing your complements makes so much sense that which license you choose kind of becomes moot (in fact, you're better off choosing a more permissive license like MIT or Apache). If you're going to open source your secret sauce, it better be because you're competing with an incumbent (GitLab -> GitHub; PostHog -> Amplitude) and desire that kind of a differentiation.
oliwarner 6y ago
It's not good that articles about GPL still can't get the terms right. It's important to understand your position as a developer. Users of your code are only obliged to "Release all modifications" to you if they're distributing the code or binary with you. This might seem like seem like nit-picking, but I can take your GPL project, work on it and sell it to a dozen companies, and you have no right to my modifications. The companies I've sold to could give you a copy if they wanted. But your rights aren't omnipresent. They also don't stop me using your code in otherwise proprietary SaaS, again contributing nothing back upstream. AGPL targets this. GPL is good. It's good for users in a way that few appreciate. More software should be GPL... But there are complexities, far more than I've covered above, that many releasing developers struggle to anticipate.
- user5994461 6y ago
  >> This might seem like seem like nit-picking, but I can take your GPL project, work on it and sell it to a dozen companies, and you have no right to my modifications. The companies I've sold to could give you a copy if they wanted. But your rights aren't omnipresent. It's even worse than that. You can sell the software without distribution modifications to the client. You only need to give modifications if the client ask for them. There is no interest for the client to request unless they want to break off from the software contract. If you're found to violate the GPL, the client will be unable to use the software, they have more to loose than you.
d0100 6y ago
I have one big issue with Commercial + GPL: It de facto prevents small players from using the software commercially. It is prohibitively expensive for non dollar-based economies to pay for USD commercial products. Sure, we are probably not the target demographic, but we exist
- hgs3 6y ago
  Couldn't this be solved by having the cost of the commercial license flex based on operating income, development budget, or team size?
  - naniwaduni 6y ago
    Not really, because having variable license costs imposes nontrivial fixed costs just to price out the license.
- davisr 6y ago
  This is a misconception--you may sell GPL software directly. I do, and I make a living with it.
- l3s2d 6y ago
  Small players are still free to use the software under the terms of the GPL. What if the software were only available under the GPL with no commercial licensing option? The small players would be in the same scenario.
webmaven 6y ago
Nice article, though the analysis is a bit simplistic (Facebook and Google's motivations for making Pytorch and Tensorflow open source are much more strategic than reduced training costs and revenue from hardware). It's also strange that having made some effort to investigate the space of open-source licensing models, the OP speculates on creating a license that allows for dual licensing but doesn't have the GPL's virality, but is seemingly not aware of the LGPL, or of the relatively common practice of giving a blanket exception for add-ons through some specific interface (such as plugins) to a GPL'd application.
seba_dos1 6y ago
I don't think this idea is as pragmatic as the author thinks it is. It works fine when you're either a solo developer (or a single group) that holds all rights to the project. It gets really messy as soon as you start to get outside contributions or want to build the community (unless you're a big project like Qt where people will contribute even if they have to assign copyright to you to do so).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jrochkind1 6y ago
> Still, this seems like the kind of problem that could be fixed by an off-shoot of the GPL meant for just this use-case. Wait, an off-shoot of the GPL that gives people permission to incorporate your code into their software that they are then allowed to sell non-GPL licenses to? That seems... unlikely, no? I don't want to dismiss the entire argument, it is worth consideration. But this particular problem of "chaining" is real and not easily dismissable as "oh, we can just make another license". It is indeed hard to devise a legal regime where you can get the benefits you want of open source (being able to use other people's code in your code), while still preserving your ability to monetize your code.
dnautics 6y ago
There is a lot of daylight between the extremes of hobbyist programmers and google in terms of making money on open source without gpl dual licensing. Two immediate examples that come to mind are sqlite (for profit) and the zig foundation (non profit).
kemitchell 6y ago
For a list of dual licensing companies, current and historical, have a look at https://duallicensing.com https://duallicensing.com. Always happy to add links to index.html: https://github.com/licensezero/duallicensing.com/ https://github.com/licensezero/duallicensing.com/ We also feature some dual licensors (under "public-private licensing") on https://indieopensource.com https://indieopensource.com. PRs there at https://github.com/indieopensource/indieopensource.com https://github.com/indieopensource/indieopensource.com. There is no universal, be-all, end-all business model for software. But I strongly believe dual licensing gets tried far less than it should, especially by solo developers and small companies.

114 points by george3d6 6y ago

The common solution to the ‘contribution problem’ inherent in dual licensing is a CLA. That never really appealed to me. It makes it harder to accept occasional contributions, while I also find it somewhat dubious to ask people to transfer copyright to a for profit entity without paying them for the work they did. One thing I wanted to try, but never really got to, was to ask contributors to license additions to a GPL project under the MIT license. These can be shipped under the proprietary license. As long as the original authors continue to do a large part of the work, most code remains GPL preventing proprietary forks and safeguarding your proprietary revenue model. [edit: clarity]

pornel 6y ago
> ask contributors to license additions to a GPL project under the MIT license I do this, and contributors are fine with it. Commercial licensees don't mind complying with a combined commercial + BSD/MIT license.
l3s2d 6y ago
In this scenario, how do you track which parts of each file are GPL and which parts are MIT?
- webmaven 6y ago
  > In this scenario, how do you track which parts of each file are GPL and which parts are MIT? All the code is GPL. The contributions are dual licensed to the maintainer as GPL+MIT, which means that the maintainer can relicense them as they please, just like the code they own the copyright for. So other than minor formalities like maintaining a list of copyright owners, the maintainer can continue to release both GPL and commercial versions unimpeded. Keeping track of which lines were contributed in this way going forward isn't really necessary (although a note in the merge commit would be prudent). The main practical difference between a CLA and actual copyright assignment is when you are suing a violator. At that point it is a bit simpler if there is one copyright owner, rather than asking other copyright owners to join the suit, but it is important to realize that they don't have to join the suit for it to go forward (in fact, every copyright owner could sue the violator independently if they wish). Only when you are the copyright owner of a minority of the software's source code (IOW most of the source comes from contributions) do things get inconvenient in terms of a violator possibly being less motivated to negotiate with you (although that would actually be really stupid on their part).
kemitchell 6y ago
Echoing others: There's nothing wrong with taking contributions to a copyleft project under compatible permissive license terms. That said, CLAs usually include protections that permissive licenses don't. For example, CLAs often require the contributor to guarantee they have the rights to license their contributions, and didn't lift code from someone else without proper permission. Anecdotally, CLAs are also just better licenses, in terms of legal implementation. Especially when it comes to patent rights, though no license can completely eliminate patent risk.

amedvednikov 6y ago

I agree with the author and think it's a great model.

_ph_ 6y ago

Dual licensing is a very fine method to make code available as open source and keep it a commercial product too. The GPL is a license which has worked for this, QT is a good example. This works best, when the dual-licensed software is the large part of your product. When using the GPL, it comes at one huge disadvantage: you cannot accept community patches to the GPL software and use them for your closed-source branch. This is the incentive for companies, to use a more permissive license for some of the software. They can reintegrate community contributions into their closed software product. Of course, this only works out, if the closed software product adds significant value over the open sourced part, or no one would buy it.

doomlaser 6y ago
What do you think would be the ideal license for the open source part of this dual license model?
- _ph_ 6y ago
  I think, and I tried to express that with my post, there is no one ideal license. It completely depends on the situation. If, like QT, the library is your whole product and you do not depend on the community for contributions, then GPL is great. It forces vendors of non-GPL software to acquire a commercial license, while open source projects can use your product without restrictions. If it is not your core product and you want to encourage community contributions, BSD and MIT might be the license of your choice. You cannot prevent other companies from using the software, but neither are you prohibited of using any community contributions in your product.
auggierose 6y ago
How about making your own contributions GPL, and the contributions of others either under a CLA, or under MIT license otherwise?
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  Many people are unwilling to sign CLA. I wanted to submit patch fixing blatant and ugly typo in README. After I got notification about requirement to sign pages of legalese I switched to doing something else and decided to never contribute to this project in any way.

rocqua 6y ago

How does dual licensing work with 'downstream contributions'? If some user finds a bug in your GPL code, fixes it, and pushes that code to your repo? You don't own the copyright to that bugfix right? So how can you re-license it under a commercial license? What about meaningful improvements instead of bug-fixes? I can see a bugfix being trivial enough. But if someone works hard to improve performance, and then some other company starts selling that work without compensation for the original author?

saagarjha 6y ago
I believe what usually happens here is a CLA that gives the project owner the right to relicense that contribution.
george3d6 6y ago
> How does dual licensing work with 'downstream contributions'? If some user finds a bug in your GPL code, fixes it, and pushes that code to your repo? > You don't own the copyright to that bugfix right? So how can you re-license it under a commercial license? The way we do it in my project, and the standard practice for Apache (where we copied it from), is tohave a CLA that gives full rights to the original owner for any patches people want to PR. > What about meaningful improvements instead of bug-fixes? I can see a bugfix being trivial enough. But if someone works hard to improve performance, and then some other company starts selling that work without compensation for the original author? This is a bigger problem, but in practice I assume it wouldn't happen because if someone were to actually put in weeks or months of work into significantly improving the project, why wouldn't you just hire them or pay them ? After all, the whole assumption here is that this is a model for a for-profit endevor.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > The way we do it in my project, and the standard practice for Apache (where we copied it from), is tohave a CLA that gives full rights to the original owner for any patches people want to PR. How do you handle that in practice with the many different law systems around the world, do you just not accept contributions from countries where authors legally cannot transfer all rights?

echelon 6y ago

> It's a nice compromise for moving towards a more open world, without having to live in Stallman's communist utopia. I'm going to go a little off topic here, but I think Open Source is being taken advantage of and needs to push harder. We've forgotten the warnings of Stallman. AGPL does a decent job against hosted services. It's a shame cloud companies have co-opted various open source database and server products and ceased contributions back to the world. With the same hand, they lock people into their managed versions. Another thing we need to fight against is providing software to companies that put users into walled gardens. We need licenses that require data export and right to forget. Encode the GDPR into our licenses. Finally, we have to fight back against embrace, extend, extinguish. Apple is trying to take over computing and prevent us from running our own code on our own devices without going through their store. We should prevent them and anyone else trying to do this from using our software. There's a lot we need to defend or we'll all wind up using opaque thin clients to access walled silos.

emteycz 6y ago
Yes, this is the correct way to fight Apple and such (even though I don't think they are a threat to open source). Don't let them use the software if they don't want to do it our way, just like they don't let us use the hardware if we don't want to do it their way.
chappi42 6y ago
> Another thing we need to fight against is providing software to companies that put users into walled gardens. We need licenses that require data export and right to forget. Encode the GDPR into our licenses. Don't like walled gardens either. But imho the "fight against" should be done by (more flexible) political regulation and not by (rather inflexible) software licenses.
- emteycz 6y ago
  I don't understand why should we work hard to get all (or half, but that's still billions) people in the world to do this if we can simply write it into the license terms and use the already existing legal framework made exactly for this purpose. I also don't understand the claimed inflexibility, IP rights are one of the most flexible pieces of legislation I know, and your license can be as flexible as you wish too. On the other hand, what in the hell is flexible about laws made only for this purpose?

saagarjha 6y ago

From an entirely moral perspective, dual licensing GPL never really felt right to me. You’re basically giving the people who are the most likely to not care one bit about the license an “out” where they don’t have to respect it anymore. If you claim your project is GPL but I’m using an device with some derivative of that project’s code in it but I can’t get the source, then I’m not getting the benefits of it being GPL. Really, I think the title is the best explanation of this strategy: you want companies to pay you; you don’t really do this if you care about the freedoms that GPL is meant to preserve. In this case the only purpose of using the GPL is that it scares big companies into paying you and lets individual projects use it for free.

george3d6 6y ago
> you don’t really do this if you care about the freedoms that GPL is meant to preserve I mean, if this was the case, why provide the source at all ? Or why make it free to use forever ? Why not release it under a license that states usage is only permitted as long as the author allows it, i.e. for a limited trial period ? My point here is that you can be pragmatic and say: If some people want to build a free world, fine, I agree with that idea in principle and I will provide my work to them for free. On the other hand, most people want a paid world, which is also fine, I might as well provide my service to them as well and benefit from it. You're not doing as much as releasing stuff under GPL-only would, in that you're giving people that pay you an out, but it seems to be better than nothing. Plus, it's a more positive approach than GPL, in that it's not actively "hurting" people that don't want to join the open source community (by not providing them any option to use the product), it's simply giving an advantage to the open source users.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > On the other hand, most people want a paid world, which is also fine, that's where there's gonna be some disagreement
  - jka 6y ago
    Slightly tongue-in-cheek, perhaps: the people who benefit from a paid world might want a paid world, while they might also want to continue to reduce their costs.

Fnoord 6y ago

Who pioneered this? Was it TrollTech with Qt? (Author mistakenly calls it QT.) Or actually FSF themselves? A disadvantage is that it goes against collaboration of people who don't profit from the proprietary version. They need to dual license their contributions by assigning their copyright to the organization (as FSF also requires). How many people refuse to collaborate as a result of this?

raverbashing 6y ago
The company is now called Qt Group https://www.qt.io/company https://www.qt.io/company
- Fnoord 6y ago
  I know Qt changed ownership (including being bought by Nokia). Qt Group for sure did not pioneer it as they didn't exist in the 90s. Not the same company as TrollTech. Were they the first with dual licensing FOSS and proprietary though?
  - phonon 6y ago
    > Not the same company as TrollTech. Yes it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company
    - Fnoord 6y ago
      Seems like it, legally. I stand corrected.
pjmlp 6y ago
I think this model is quite fair to upstream, anyone that isn't willing to pay for their tools gets the same treatment for their own projects.
kemitchell 6y ago
The canonical "founding father" of free/open software dual licensing among FOSS wonks is L. Peter Deutsch, of Ghostscript fame. His companies ran a number of business models in their early days, dual licensing among them. The canonical "popularizer" is probably MySQL AB, followed by Trolltech/Qt. These days, Open Core is riding high. Dual licensing also had its day, and may again. The more general pattern of "free under these public terms, else pay us" for software goes back far further. Mosaic and Navigator were early Web-enabled examples. Before that, some "shareware" traded on physical media was feature-complete and unlocked, but license-limited, on the honor system. Outside of software, in other media covered by copyright, the model is old as the hills, and far older than the Free Software movement. Especially with noncommercial terms for free use.

vortico 6y ago

We (https://vcvrack.com/ https://vcvrack.com/) do this and it works great for us and our users. Wouldn't give up the licensing scheme for the world. We'll soon release a proprietary fork (Rack for DAWs) of our GPLv3 software (Rack) as a new funding source. It's the perfect funding scheme and has no major disadvantages. The author makes profit from a fork of the software, which requires/causes the GPL version to be actively maintained (since new functionality and bug fixes of the proprietary fork often derive from modifications of the GPL software). And the user has a choice of using the open-source/free software, which they can freely run, review, modify, and share, or purchase the proprietary software. By Economics 101 theory, a "trade" is always mutually beneficial if the user's intrinsic value of the software is greater than the purchase price. As mentioned by others, we can't accept patches to our GPL software without a contributor license agreement (such as a paid contractor position), so make sure you're aware of this before choosing the dual-GPL/proprietary scheme for your own software. This isn't a big concern for us because in my personal experience, a patch that actually saves me time in the long run is very rare (See Quality section of https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/blob/v1/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/blob/v1/.github/CONTRIBUTING.... You get what you pay for.) But I'm perfectly fine with doing everything myself or through hired work.

polytely 6y ago
Just want to say thanks for working on VCV Rack, it made modular synthesis accessible to the masses and I have gotten a lot of joy out of it. Keep up the great work!
reitzensteinm 6y ago
Off topic, but I'm wondering if you have any plans to have some kind of demo functionality for your commercial plugins? For instance adding them to your account for an hour, or have everything have a demo scene where they're functional but you can't modify connections or add modules (just play with the knobs). I checked out VCV rack when it was posted to HN the first time, and it seemed like a cool toy at the time. I'm blown away by the ecosystem that's built up now. Absolutely phenomenal.
- 6y ago

pjmlp 6y ago

I also think this is the best approach, it allows for commercial use, and anyone that doesn't want to pay for it, gets the same commercial benefits as they are willing to give upstream.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

I'm probably stating the obvious, but GPL licensing (AGPL, even) hasn't worked so well for MongoDB, Redis, and many other projects/products in these times of SaaS. In fact, the proliferation of SaaS business models can be seen as a direct consequence of the abundance of F/OSS software.

auggierose 6y ago
I wonder if this couldn't easily be fixed by using this license: https://opensource.org/licenses/NPOSL-3.0 https://opensource.org/licenses/NPOSL-3.0 It is open-source, but disallows commercial for-profit use.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Idk I thought the problem isn't so much self-hosting by end-users (commercial or not) but "cloud vendors" able to provide services build by others in aggregations and at price points those others can't meet, precisely because of their development costs.
  - auggierose 6y ago
    As far as I understand the NPOSL-3.0, cloud vendors would definitely count as for-profit, and therefore not be allowed to use the software, even in an aggregated way. They would have to obtain a separate license.
    - tannhaeuser 6y ago
      Yes, but the sweet spot for many services is the ability to offer hosting while allowing self-hosting, free dev licenses, and third-party integrations. It's a particularly good no-brainer sales story to contrast with self-hosting dominated by admin/HR, and possibly hardware/data center costs.
      - auggierose 6y ago
        I guess this spot is not so sweet when Amazon "self-hosts" your software. So you need to make up your mind.

Const-me 6y ago

Good article, but there’s a point missing. GPL incentivizes people to creates web apps instead of desktop or native mobile apps. This way they can reuse GPL pieces without open sourcing their derived works. Developers are probably OK with that, they can charge monthly fee for a SAAS, also it’s easier to develop software for just 1 hardware configuration + one web browser (or a few browsers if you support mobile). However, as an end user, I prefer native apps. They don’t require internet connection. I’m in full control over my data. Native apps are often faster, even smartphones have rather high count of these GFLOPs in both CPUs and GPUs, even when the servers are fast and over-provisioned, network latency often kills the performance.

phoe-krk 6y ago
Yes, this is a hole in the GPL. Use AGPL as appropriate to solve this.
saurik 6y ago
Which is kind of why the GPL should probably be obsoleted by the AGPL (or even something much stronger, that makes the situation with services being constructed out of libraries and then used two levels indirect more clear).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wffurr 6y ago
GPL is hardly the primary factor driving web over native. A true write once, run anywhere, frictionless install, no gatekeepers platform has a lot going for it.
- Const-me 6y ago
  > A true write once, run anywhere Despite I never worked on modern web apps, as a user, I don’t believe it’s true. I observe broken web apps more often than desktop apps. Browsers are incredibly complicated these days, the APIs they expose to developers are less stable than APIs exposed by operating systems. The internet between frontend and backend is a huge source of bugs (latency, end-point security, packet inspection in enterprise, public routers using custom web-based authorization forms). Some web apps collect their dependencies in runtime from all over the Internets and become broken when these third parties update something. > frictionless install For mobile platforms or UWP it’s equally frictionless. Windows desktops have ClickOnce, and even with traditional MSI installers clicking “I agree-next-finish” only causes minimal amount of friction. > no gatekeepers platform Right, on mobile that’s a very good reason :-(

jitendrac 6y ago

I also support dual licensing the projects. It allows companies to release reasonably good part of their product in public domain, while still catering the needs of enterprise clients. Mostly they also release some part of awesome enterprise features in gradual timeframes. we can fork and release community versions according to our needs(respecting IP and trademarks of company). We can also contribute upstream changes by dual licensing our contributed code with GPL and to their proprietary contributor license. My favorite projects following this route are Redhat/CentOS, MySql/MariaDB and Virtualbox.

boltefnovor 6y ago

I understand the dual license idea. But why does it need to be GPL? Why not dual license MIT/BSD plus a commercial version with more features?

Etheryte 6y ago
This is addressed in the article, if you license your software as MIT, whoever uses it is in their right to do essentially whatever they want with it, including using it for profit without paying you a dime. The idea with dual licensing with GPL is that the user has to either open-source their code, which most corporations will not want to do, or use the paid licensing scheme.
- boltefnovor 6y ago
  Has that worked in the real world? I know some companies have had their software nabbed by other companies..... did they not use GPL? I guess I’m thinking of elasticsearch but surely other companies have been turned into services by big companies?
  - eitland 6y ago
    Certain companies have complained because other companies made a profit from selling hosting of their (A)GPL software. This is totally OK with the (A)GPL which is why certain companies has tried to come up with new licenses, none of which are compatible with OSI Open Source. (I specify OSI Open Source here since someone took the time to dig out enough references to convince me (and probably others) that the term open source was used more or less for the same idea well before OSI started using it.)
    - Etheryte 6y ago
      For anyone interested in this in more detail, [1] and [2] offer good examples and context. [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html [2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/2127313/1470607 https://stackoverflow.com/a/2127313/1470607

boltefnovor 6y ago

Is there anything a like license that would prevent cloud providers turning my software into a service they sell? And at the same time is fully open for usage that does not sell it as a service?

Macha 6y ago
AGPL is the closest but arguments abound over whether it covers orchestration/deployment layers. And there's nothing saying they won't just reimplement your service (see AWS DocumentDB).

delusional 6y ago

Cool article. I like the topic, and I think it makes some fair points. I do have to question the use of the quote from GNU, because it doesn't engage with the GPL where the GPL is. The GPL is not a guide for how to create a software project that survives. It's not a license optimized towards maximizing funding for project. The GPL exists as a tool to protect the 4 essential freedoms. It's possible to have long and boring discussions about how Linux would have turned out if it had been MIT licensed, but they've been had before. for GNU, the GPL, and the FSF, it's clear that if your project can't survive while protecting the users 4 freedoms, then it does not deserve to exist. If you want to engage GNU and the FSF (and supporters of either project) in a discussion about dual licensing and the GPL, the 4 freedoms have to be central. It's not an engineering discussion, it's a moral and ethical one.

symisc_devel 6y ago

At PixLab, we believe this is the right approach to license SDKs & C Libraries. We did this with our embedded Computer Vision Library (https://pixlab.io/downloads https://pixlab.io/downloads) and it did works quite well. Corporations really hate anything GPL related and will ultimately purchase commercial licenses at high cost to get rid of GPL if they are interested enough in your product. Note that dual licensing was first popularized by Sleepycat software makers of BerkeleyDB now absorbed by Oracle. They were profitable during their short lifespan thanks to this approach.

jordigh 6y ago

Stallman was hesitant but in favour of this. He called it selling exceptions. His reasoning is that selling exceptions merely permits someone else to create non-free software, but that weak free licenses like the MIT license already allows this, therefore, selling GPL exceptions wasn't worse than weak licenses, in his view. https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions bkuhn has had more first-hand experience with it. It's been disastrous. The way exceptions are sold are by scaring copyleft users with frivolous copyleft violations and offering them no recourse to correct the violation except by buying a non-free license. Oracle and Mongo are the most famous examples of vendors who bully their users with threats of copyleft violation, telling them the only way to correct the violation is by paying. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...

reitzensteinm 6y ago
I read the whole thing waiting to get to an example of what a "frivolous" violation is. I probably agree with him or her but it does hinge on that and it's an important detail to leave out.
Proven 6y ago
Stallman did some things right but doesn't understand freedom. How is this dual licensing (with GPL 3.0 at that) different from selling proprietary s/w licensed to the buyer together with its source code? GPL 3.0 means one has to release changes made in-house to the s/w whereas a proprietary license would free them from that _obligation_. For many users a non-OSS approach would work much better and be cheaper too (no legal BS, no need to review changes and release them). Tiny minority (those who'd fork it under GPL) would prefer Stallman's way, but it's easy to see how Stallman's "freedom" wouldn't work for 95% of users...
kemitchell 6y ago
Best short summary of Stallman's published position I've seen. Nice. I also have first-hand experience with selling exceptions. My experience has differed markedly from Bradley's. Lots of small companies sell exceptions without any aggressive, professional, commission-driven sales team. Many publish helpful guides and FAQs on their licensing situations that clear up confusion about the (A)GPLs. Some have chosen new or different public licenses, in much plainer language, to avoid that confusion in the first place. For what it's worth, I remember reading Bradley's secondhand report of shakedowns by MongoDB. I've never worked directly with MongoDB, either, but I was surprised. What I've heard from MongoDB employees is very different: they spent a lot of time sending out "comfort letters" clarifying that people could use AGPL Mongo in their applications without releasing the whole shebang. I don't think Mongo sends such letters to competing cloud providers. When it comes to proprietary cloud providers, I thought the point of AGPL was to demand cloud users share alike or leave AGPL code alone. I think Bradley and I would probably agree that big companies have given dual licensing a bad name. But we might agree they've often done the same for permissive licenses, too. I don't think little companies, especially little companies not Hell bent on becoming behemoths or getting acquired by them, deserve the bad rap. From a business point of view, small companies are precisely where dual licensing matters. Oracle-scale companies can well afford to develop and manage differentiated open/community and enhanced/enterprise projects. If they're selling exceptions for the whole codebase instead, it's likely either dead-end code they don't want to invest in, or they're up to something else, leveraging their other BigCo advantages.

pornel 6y ago

I did this for some of my projects and it worked quite well. I think it's a nice balance between supporting free software community, and avoiding being a sucker who does free labor for corporations. Financially it works orders of magnitude better than asking for donations or individual patronage. Corporations operate on a completely different scale of money.

ignoramous 6y ago

> Why can Google develop TensorFlow? Because they can make a lot more money from selling/renting TensorFlow optimized hardware. Joel said it the best (in 2002!): Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements. ... Headline: Sun Develops Java; New “Bytecode” System Means Write Once, Run Anywhere. The bytecode idea is not new — programmers have always tried to make their code run on as many machines as possible. (That’s how you commoditize your complement). For years Microsoft had its own p-code compiler and portable windowing layer which let Excel run on Mac, Windows, and OS/2, and on Motorola, Intel, Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC chips. Quark has a layer which runs Macintosh code on Windows. The C programming language is best described as a hardware-independent assembler language. It’s not a new idea to software developers. If you can run your software anywhere, that makes hardware more of a commodity. As hardware prices go down, the market expands, driving more demand for software (and leaving customers with extra money to spend on software which can now be more expensive.) Sun’s enthusiasm for WORA is, um, strange, because Sun is a hardware company. Making hardware a commodity is the last thing they want to do. Oooooooooooooooooooooops! https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ Highly recommended reading it. This blog post gave us right framework to be able to decide which components to open source without worrying about licenses (we have used Apache and Mozilla Public License so far for different projects). Also, enforcing GPL has turned out to be not straight-forward? If you intend to make money then open sourcing your complements makes so much sense that which license you choose kind of becomes moot (in fact, you're better off choosing a more permissive license like MIT or Apache). If you're going to open source your secret sauce, it better be because you're competing with an incumbent (GitLab -> GitHub; PostHog -> Amplitude) and desire that kind of a differentiation.

oliwarner 6y ago

It's not good that articles about GPL still can't get the terms right. It's important to understand your position as a developer. Users of your code are only obliged to "Release all modifications" to you if they're distributing the code or binary with you. This might seem like seem like nit-picking, but I can take your GPL project, work on it and sell it to a dozen companies, and you have no right to my modifications. The companies I've sold to could give you a copy if they wanted. But your rights aren't omnipresent. They also don't stop me using your code in otherwise proprietary SaaS, again contributing nothing back upstream. AGPL targets this. GPL is good. It's good for users in a way that few appreciate. More software should be GPL... But there are complexities, far more than I've covered above, that many releasing developers struggle to anticipate.

user5994461 6y ago
>> This might seem like seem like nit-picking, but I can take your GPL project, work on it and sell it to a dozen companies, and you have no right to my modifications. The companies I've sold to could give you a copy if they wanted. But your rights aren't omnipresent. It's even worse than that. You can sell the software without distribution modifications to the client. You only need to give modifications if the client ask for them. There is no interest for the client to request unless they want to break off from the software contract. If you're found to violate the GPL, the client will be unable to use the software, they have more to loose than you.

d0100 6y ago

I have one big issue with Commercial + GPL: It de facto prevents small players from using the software commercially. It is prohibitively expensive for non dollar-based economies to pay for USD commercial products. Sure, we are probably not the target demographic, but we exist

hgs3 6y ago
Couldn't this be solved by having the cost of the commercial license flex based on operating income, development budget, or team size?
- naniwaduni 6y ago
  Not really, because having variable license costs imposes nontrivial fixed costs just to price out the license.
davisr 6y ago
This is a misconception--you may sell GPL software directly. I do, and I make a living with it.
l3s2d 6y ago
Small players are still free to use the software under the terms of the GPL. What if the software were only available under the GPL with no commercial licensing option? The small players would be in the same scenario.

webmaven 6y ago

Nice article, though the analysis is a bit simplistic (Facebook and Google's motivations for making Pytorch and Tensorflow open source are much more strategic than reduced training costs and revenue from hardware). It's also strange that having made some effort to investigate the space of open-source licensing models, the OP speculates on creating a license that allows for dual licensing but doesn't have the GPL's virality, but is seemingly not aware of the LGPL, or of the relatively common practice of giving a blanket exception for add-ons through some specific interface (such as plugins) to a GPL'd application.

seba_dos1 6y ago

I don't think this idea is as pragmatic as the author thinks it is. It works fine when you're either a solo developer (or a single group) that holds all rights to the project. It gets really messy as soon as you start to get outside contributions or want to build the community (unless you're a big project like Qt where people will contribute even if they have to assign copyright to you to do so).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jrochkind1 6y ago

> Still, this seems like the kind of problem that could be fixed by an off-shoot of the GPL meant for just this use-case. Wait, an off-shoot of the GPL that gives people permission to incorporate your code into their software that they are then allowed to sell non-GPL licenses to? That seems... unlikely, no? I don't want to dismiss the entire argument, it is worth consideration. But this particular problem of "chaining" is real and not easily dismissable as "oh, we can just make another license". It is indeed hard to devise a legal regime where you can get the benefits you want of open source (being able to use other people's code in your code), while still preserving your ability to monetize your code.

dnautics 6y ago

There is a lot of daylight between the extremes of hobbyist programmers and google in terms of making money on open source without gpl dual licensing. Two immediate examples that come to mind are sqlite (for profit) and the zig foundation (non profit).

kemitchell 6y ago

For a list of dual licensing companies, current and historical, have a look at https://duallicensing.com https://duallicensing.com. Always happy to add links to index.html: https://github.com/licensezero/duallicensing.com/ https://github.com/licensezero/duallicensing.com/ We also feature some dual licensors (under "public-private licensing") on https://indieopensource.com https://indieopensource.com. PRs there at https://github.com/indieopensource/indieopensource.com https://github.com/indieopensource/indieopensource.com. There is no universal, be-all, end-all business model for software. But I strongly believe dual licensing gets tried far less than it should, especially by solo developers and small companies.