Dual Licensing
Scott Johnston
johnston at vectaport.com
Mon Nov 22 19:00:36 UTC 1999
>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.
One thing to note is this requires an assignment of copyright of any
derivative work done on the GPL branch back to the dual licensor to get
those patches incorporated in the original work. This is how L. Peter
Deutsch does it, and he has said he finds very few programmers object. For
him it is the best of both worlds. He gets to use the compelling nature of
the GPL to facilitate cooperation, then gets the sole freedom to sell
proprietary yet community-improved works. Deutsch was a consultant to Sun
when they developed their Community Source License for Java. It seems a
close cousin to dual-licensing as he practices it.
Scott Johnston
More information about the License-discuss
mailing list