Which OS license should we use?

[Danese Cooper]

Clint,

I'd be *shocked* if anyone on license-discuss was willing to give you 
free legal advice.  You need to consult a lawyer about this (you'll 
probably get a number of contacts at least from your email).

In general, you need to figure out what your business goals are and then 
consult with a lawyer to find the best license choices for your 
particular goals.  Dual-licensing is a means to an end which several 
other companies have used successfully but much depends on the 
composition of your codebase, the market conditions you are dealing 
with, the types of partners you wish to attract, etc.

Danese Cooper

Clint Oram wrote:

> Hi there -
>  
> We are building a professional open source company and are curious which
> open source license you suggest we use.  Our goal is to build a profitable
> company around dual licensing - providing an open source version of our
> product and a commercial version of the product.  
>  
> We feel that a software company built around an open source product will
> first significantly reduce our sales and marketing costs.  Second, we expect
> the open source version will greatly reduce barriers-to-entry to our product
> from both a partner ecosystem perspective and more importantly a customer
> acquisition perspective.  Finally, we flat out believe that delivering an
> open source product will enable users/customers to have a more direct voice
> in the building of the product which will result in a better product.
>  
> We plan to translate this combination of factors into a lower cost product
> offering that will delight end-users.
>  
> Our goals for the open source license and commercial license are:
> 1. Enable partners and customers to easily enhance/enrich/expand the product
> through "GPL-like" conditions
> 2. Allow our company to roll 'contributed open source code' into our
> commercial release.  What do you think about the Mozilla Public License?  Or
> the eCos open source license (
> <http://ecos.sourceware.org/license-overview.html>
> http://ecos.sourceware.org/license-overview.html)
> 3. The ability to sell our open source code line as a commercial release
>     a. With additional modules contributed to our open source project
>     b. With additional value-add modules not in the open source product 
>     c. With full support, maintenance, warranty and indemnification
> 
> So with that said, which open source license do you think best meets those
> goals?
>  
> I appreciate your advice.
>  
> Clint
>  
> Clint Oram
> Co-Founder and VP Products & Services
> clint at sugarcrm.com
> (650) 315-6321
> SUGARCRM Inc.  It's a sweet deal.
> Startup in residence at the SDForum   <http://www.sdforum.org/>
> http://www.sdforum.org
>  
> 
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