Dual licensing

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Marius Amado Alves (amado.alves at netcabo.pt):

> I know this, and this is the single 'wrong' thing about free software in 
> the view on many people (SDC, UUU, Alladin...) Putting the authors out 
> of the loop is silly and unfair.

If you don't like losing even that much of the ultimate control that's
otherwise guaranteed to the copyright owner by copyright statutes, then
don't.  But then it's not open source.

Nobody's forcing you or any other software author to use open source
licensing.  You're always perfectly free to use any proprietary
licensing of your choosing.  The open source community consists of
coders and users who've become tired of some of the consequences of the
proprietary model, and therefore have opted out.  For example, even
Dan Bernstein's software[1], as generous as his permission grants for
them are, may not be lawfully maintained in any straightforward and
long-term-feasible fashion by successor programmers, for lack of legal
permission to create and distribute derivatives.

A lot of us, long ago, got tired of being trapped using software that
suddenly becomes no longer available, has restrictions on use, or cannot 
lawfully be maintained by its surrounding community.  So, we gradually
replaced it.

The programmers of the resulting codebases?  Nobody put them "out of the
loop" in the sense you speak of.  They decided by themselves, for
diverse reasons, not to be there.

If you, for your part, would rather not, that's OK.  Nobody minds, and
we can be friendly neighbours.  You might even decide that the
advantages of open source are compelling for some of your projects, even
if not for most of yours.

[1] A couple of his smaller and older packages are open source, but I'm
referring here to his major and newer ones.

-- 
Cheers,             The shortest distance between two puns is a straightline.
Rick Moen
rick at linuxmafia.com
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