Dual licensing

[Rick Moen]

Quoting nospam+pixelglow.com at pixelglow.com (nospam+pixelglow.com at pixelglow.com):

> Ideally, I would like to craft a dual license that says, in legalese,
> "if you don't pay, reciprocate; if you pay, you don't have to
> reciprocate". QED.

This clearly isn't the right mailing list to seek help with that.  More
about that below.

> However like Marius I find the GPL and other open source licenses
> inadequate to express this, since most if not all allow certain
> situations to avoid reciprocation e.g. internal use, web services. I
> should think GPL and friends were never designed to be the "bad cop"
> part of a "good cop, bad cop" dual-licensing scheme to get proprietary
> users to pay.

Surprisingly enough, many things turn out to have uses for which they
were never designed.  Of a certainty, you're correct that Prof. Moglen
and Richard Stallman most definitely never designed the GNU GPL to be a
component of a proprietary-software business model.  Notwithstanding 
that fact, it's definitely feasible to do so in some circumstances -- as
I believe I mentioned earlier.

Now, people here are generally (if somewhat vaguely) sympathetic to your
desire to find a business model that works for you, because we're
generally pleasant and agreeable people.  But sooner or later we'll
tend to come back to an inconvenient fact -- that this ultimately is
just not the "Improve Glen Low's Business" mailing list.

However,, if you want to start such a list, I can recommend some good
open-source software to run it on.  ;->

-- 
Cheers,                            Ceterum censeo, Caldera delenda est.
Rick Moen
rick at linuxmafia.com  
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3