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Dual licensing requires copyright assignment, largely preventing a community of contributors forming around the software (nobody wants to provide free labor to

by jabl 6y ago

Dual licensing requires copyright assignment, largely preventing a community of contributors forming around the software (nobody wants to provide free labor to somebody else's get rich quick scheme), which is one of the big advantages of OSS in the first place. In a way, dual licensing is essentially proprietary software, with a for free version that you hope will satisfy as few users as possible. A bit like the old shareware days. Dual licensing also creates the perverse incentive of trying to scare your potential customers how horrible copyleft licensing is. So if you motivation is to increase the amount of FOSS through copyleft licensing, you're shooting yourself in the foot. See https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...

cutemonster 6y ago
> Dual licensing requires copyright assignment No.
- kemitchell 6y ago
  cutemonster is correct. Dual licensing can and does happen without copyright assignments. It can even happen without contributor license agreements, if contributors make their work available under permissive terms in addition to the required copyleft terms.
kemitchell 6y ago
The perverse incentive of scaring people about the license only really works if the license is hard to parse or the sales team is really unethical. Unfortunately that has proved the case when firms choose a GPL and hire the wrong people. If the license is straightforward enough, or comes from a neutral organization that publishes trustworthy lay summaries, as Creative Commons does, there's less room for sales incentives to run wild. The usual conflicts of interest in other business models, like holding back code or doc, making the software hard to use, and so on break down, because there's just one product. Customers pay to use the product.

by jabl 6y ago

cutemonster 6y ago

> Dual licensing requires copyright assignment No.

kemitchell 6y ago
cutemonster is correct. Dual licensing can and does happen without copyright assignments. It can even happen without contributor license agreements, if contributors make their work available under permissive terms in addition to the required copyleft terms.

kemitchell 6y ago

The perverse incentive of scaring people about the license only really works if the license is hard to parse or the sales team is really unethical. Unfortunately that has proved the case when firms choose a GPL and hire the wrong people. If the license is straightforward enough, or comes from a neutral organization that publishes trustworthy lay summaries, as Creative Commons does, there's less room for sales incentives to run wild. The usual conflicts of interest in other business models, like holding back code or doc, making the software hard to use, and so on break down, because there's just one product. Customers pay to use the product.