dual license with BSD and other

[James W. Thompson, II]

I mentioned this already but the Sleepycat license is a derivative of
the BSD license which stipulates that the code must remain available
unless other licensing terms are secured without all the confusion of
the GPL. The thing that bothers me about a strict BSD license is that
it leaves the option open for your code to be assimilated and closed
off by a third-party. The Sleepycat license resolves this issue for me
while still being a whole lot shorter and simpler than the GPL.

http://opensource.org/licenses/sleepycat.php


-James
IANAL


On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 17:58:39 -0500, Ned Lilly <ned at nedscape.com> wrote:
> John Cowan wrote:
> 
> > James W. Thompson, II scripsit:
> >
> >
> >>Unless perhaps if that "proprietary" license gave access to support or warranty.
> >
> >
> > That's a separate issue; you can issue a program under the GPL exclusively,
> > or the BSD exclusively, and still sell support or warranty protection.
> >
> 
> I guess it's a question of whether the target audience for the commercially-licensed code would still feel more comfortable with a traditional license, or a support relationship with the vendor of an OSS-only licensed product.
> 
> Here's my situation.  My company has a GUI report writer and rendering engine, which we've built as part of our ERP system.  We've carved it off as a free-standing product, with the expectation that other people might be interested in an open source alternative to Crystal Reports, etc.  (It's built with Qt, and runs equally well on Linux, Windows, Mac, etc.)
> 
> There are two things that prompted me to explore the idea of a dual license with BSD as the open flavor:
> 
> 1) I'm a little worried that GPL'ing the report writer might have unintended consequences with regard to our ERP application (which we market under a hybrid source code license not intended to be OSI-blessed).
> 
> 2) I'm also a fan of the BSD license from my long association with PostgreSQL (which is the foundation of our ERP).
> 
> I'd certainly appreciate any other thoughts or opinions.
> 
> thanks,
> Ned
> 


-- 
James W. Thompson, II (New Orleans, LA)