I give up...

[Arnoud Engelfriet]

jacobus.vosloo at daimlerchrysler.com wrote:
> I am trying to convince my manager to develop a specific component as open
> source.  The problem is that this component will be used in and/or included
> into many projects that's code must stay proprietary and secret.
> It will also be used by a group of open source programmers inside their
> potentially GNU GPL licensed software.
> As far as possible I want to avoid licensing it differently for the
> involved parties. I.e. no dual license

If your company has developed the code, they can release it under
the GPL to that group of programmers, and at the same time keep it
entirely proprietary in the internal project. The copyright holder
does not have to adhere to his own license. So if you publish the
code under the GPL, you can still use the code in the internal
project without having to do anything special.

Of course you cannot ever use any modifications from the external,
GPL-licensed project in your proprietary internal project.

How will your company benefit from the release as open source?

> I looked at the BSD license, but the clause below make me unsure.
> The proprietary product that will depend on this component must be released
> under it's own license completely.

The MIT license may be more to your liking. It allows incorporation
into any project, with the sole requirement that you must keep
intact the copyright notices and the MIT license in the source code.
There are no obligations on a binary distribution, so the project
with closed source does not have to publish anything.

The MIT license is compatible with the GPL, so the code can be
added to a GPL-licensed project. 

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

An even more liberal license is the zlib/libpng license.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/zlib-license.php

Arnoud

-- 
Arnoud Engelfriet, Dutch patent attorney - Speaking only for myself
Patents, copyright and IPR explained for techies: http://www.iusmentis.com/
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3