Dual licensing

[Marius Amado Alves]

>>Red Hat sells a *closed* configuration. And mainly support (Red Hat 
>>Enterprise etc.) Not the open software (Fedora).
> 
> 
> There is, as far as I can tell, nothing the least bit proprietary in the
> software contents of any of the RHEL 3.0 variants....

You're right and I was wrong on this point. I forgot that open does not 
imply public.

> As far as I (a non-lawyer, and thus not offering professional legal
> advice) can tell, a lawful possessor of RHEL 3.0 may (per USA law and
> probably others) lawfully duplicate and give away duplicates of his CDs.

IANAL either but I'm pretty sure this is the case.

> By using trademark rights and a bundled service agreement to offer a
> branded, supported offering to business only for an annual fee, yet also
> respecting fully the rights of forking and redistribution in all of the
> software's licences, Red Hat, Inc. strikes me as having accomplished
> something remarkable and (in my view) commendable.

Yes. But note it's brand, and support, that make most of the business. 
Not the software items themselves. (Please remember this is the academic 
question!)

> I see no reason why a reciprocal licence necessarily _must_ be a
> component of dual-licensing; rather, the pragmatic licence-compatbility
> problems requiring dual-licensing just don't seem to arise with
> combinations solely of non-copylefted codebases.  
> 
> The primary non-copyleft open-source licenses, to the best of my
> recollection, are as follows:
> 
> o  Old BSD licence (advertising clause)
> o  Apache licence (newer versions of which have patent-termination clauses)
> o  MIT X11 licence, or equivalently
> o  New BSD licence.
> 
> Those mix well not so much because of the lack of a reciprocal/copyleft 
> provision per se, but more exactly because they lack provisions that
> limit licence combination.
> 
> It would be perverse to create a non-reciprocal licence that clashes
> with the above licences, but could certainly be done easily.  Here's an
> example:
> 
>    Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
>    modification, are permitted provided that this software not be used
>    to create derivative works with codebases under the BSD, Apache, or 
>    MIT X11 licences.

I was also privately referred to the Microsoft EULAs as an example of 
terms meant to avoid mixing with OOS.

Thanks all.


--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3