Draft 1 of the OpenDesk.com Public Source License

[Scott Johnston]

>  This dual licensing idea, GPL plus whatever other thing you like,  
>is not the answer.  It's a workaround; and a hack at that.

Here's an item of historical interest to free software.  I attended a talk
given by Richard Stallman back in 1990 (or 1991) at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto
Research Center) and the question of dual licenses came up. I forget what
Stallman's initial response was (I don't think he was for it), but lo and
behold, L. Peter Deutsch was in the audience.  He explained to everyone how
he had contacted the Free Software Foundation before writing ghostscript,
and obtained their agreement that he could distribute ghostscript under both
the GPL and a proprietary license (which has made him enough money to be
able to retire in Silicon Valley).  So there you have it.  Dual licensing,
it would seem, originated from a compromise the FSF made to acquire a
PostScript interpreter for the GNU project.  I remember a little regret
expressed by Stallman that this was the case.

Scott Johnston
http://www.vectaport.com