Dual Licensing

[V. Alex Brennen]

Wilfredo Sanchez wrote:
> 
> | Why not dual-license? GPL + anything else you please. That way,
> | if people want to do GPL work, they accept your GPL license.
> | Someone who wants to do commercial work accepts your APSL 1.1
> | clone.
> 
>   This is contrary to the goal of sharing code.  It's one thing to
> allow forking.  This strategy encourages forking in a way that makes
> it difficult for the forked versions to share code.  That's highly
> undesireable if your goal is to create for best possible software.

I agree that such a strategy does encourage forking.
However, the majority of free source code is licensed
under the GPL.  If code is licensed under a license
other than the GPL which does not allow the code's
inclusion in GPL'd code, it cannot be incorporated
into programs which are in the GPL codebase.  This
fact will significantly limit the propagation, and
therefor the positive impact (or value to the
community and to the author) of the code release.

I like dual licensing with GPL + Anything because it 
allows the technology (code) into the GPL'd code base
as well as into other places - the commercial sector
for example.  I believe that forking is not a critical 
issue - other forces exist to counter balance it.

You may not agree with me here, these views are based
on what I personally believe to be the goals of free
software - to allow faster technological advancement
by reducing duplicated effort, and to spread more
advanced technology rapidly through out all software
improving both quality and functionality with out the
encumbrance of monetary exchanges or distribution
restrictions. I realize this is not the stated goal
of the FSF project, but free software has been around
longer than the FSF.

Those of you who remember me from earlier posts: yes
it's really me, the email isn't forged - My views
have changed radically since I started reading
license-discuss and thinking about licensing and 
opensource heavily.  

Dual licensing is definitely worth considering.  It is
even worth considering if you are not interested in 
licenses as diverse as, for example, the GPL and an
Apache style license.  If you fail to get OSI
certification on your license, it may be worth while
for you to consider pulling, into a separate license,
the parts of your license which were responsible for
your failure of the OSI certification process.  You
could then have an opensource version of your software
and a version under a more restrictive license.  The
more restrictive license may allow you to, for example,
create a product from your software for which you are
able to offer technical support or compatibility
guarantees.

	- VAB