Nees help selecting a license

[Christophe Dupre]

Hello,
my employer is considering releasing some software modules scientific
computing we have developped.

Up until now, those modules were made available for a fee to commercial
entities so that they could develop commercial software based on the
techniques. We'd like to still be able to do that (those fees pay for the
researchers) but also allow open source software to make use of the code.

It seems to me that TrollTech is already doing something similar, but what
isn't clear to me si how to deal with 3rd party patch submission. Clearly,
we would not be the copyright owner of those patches, and so wouldn't have
the right to sell commercial licenses for them, yet we'd like to not have
to maintain two versions of the code.

We have asked our lawyers, but their solutions involves a very thick
license - something tells me they have no much knowledge about free
software, the GPL, etc.

--
Christophe Dupre
System Administrator, Scientific Computation Research Center
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY        USA
Phone: (518) 276-2578  -  Fax: (518) 276-4886

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