Dual licensing

[Marius Amado Alves]

Great reply, Ian, thanks.

> Why should people give away copies of it?  What would they gain by
> doing that?  In fact, they would lose: they would spend money to get
> software, and then they would give it to their competitors for free.
> Certainly some altruistic individual might pay for the software and
> then give it away.  In practice, nobody bothers.  It's just not worth
> worrying about that kind of thing, at least not in the space that we
> are in (embedded operating systems and development tools).  If you
> want to run a business, you have to worry about the problems that you
> really do encounter, not the problems that might theoretically arise.

You have to try to foresee some things, e.g. for pricing. But I get the 
gist. However note that this does not work well when you want the open 
source *development* model, i.e. lots of authors around the world. In 
this context the sources become available gratis at several places, 
simply for technical matters.

> This is all beside the point I wanted to make.  Even if we only sold
> support, that would still be a case of commercial open source
> software....

Yes, I see. Finally a compelling argument. Name collision. Thanks. I'll 
change the terminology.


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