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> After all, software could not be both open and closed. It turns out software can be both open and closed, and it's a good approach IMHO: the software creator
by jph 6y ago
> After all, software could not be both open and closed.
It turns out software can be both open and closed, and it's a good approach IMHO: the software creator can provide an open source license and a closed source license. Then users can choose the license that's best for their purposes.
This approach is currently playing out with some for-profit software companies that want to offer open source to end users, yet don't want to enable direct competitors (e.g. Elastic vs. Amazon) or do want to enable for-pay customers to bypass sharing work (e.g. I write GPL software, and one of my regulated-industry customers prefers to pay for a proprietary license rather than use GPL).
- corty 6y agoExactly. A lot of the whining can be avoided by a dual AGPL3 (maybe GPL3) plus proprietary "call for a quote and contract negotiations" license. Most big cloud shops will avoid AGPL, so they will pay, the rest will be as happy with AGPL as with BSD or Apache.
- cardanome 6y agoMostly agreed but in the case of Elastic against Amazon that would not have helped much. Amazon has no issues contributing back and could probably cope with AGPL. They don't need a advantage in features, they can just destroy any competition with their market advantages. So AGPL is a good first step but maybe we need even stricter license against monopolistic corporations.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoThat is not open source vis-à-vis closed source; that is copyleft vis-à-vis permissive both of which are open source.
- type0 6y agoThat's not what one usually mean by the dual licenses