OSI-approved license that assigns contributor copyright to me

[Alex Bligh]

--On 10 July 2005 23:22 -0700 David Barrett <dbarrett at quinthar.com> wrote:

> However, the final lines confuse me.  What are the "other license(s)" to
> which this refers?  For example, let's say I maintain two forks of the
> codebase: one that is publicly available under QPL, and the other that is
> proprietary.  What I *think* this is saying is that I can apply QPL
> contributions to both the QPL and proprietary fork, but I can't apply QPL
> contributions to only the proprietary fork.

That is correct. You cannot have a proprietary version with enhanced
functionality either (even if those enhancements are nothing to do
with the contributed code) - as soon as the ID takes a single modification,
ANY use of it has to be made publicly available under the QPL. Read
literally, you could not even have a non-QPL version where the only
difference was that it indicated the end user had paid for it.

Thus the QPL is not suitable for the situation where the ID plans to
have a thriving open-source product, but gains revenue from selling an
enhanced version with extra functionality (unless the ID relies on
separate assignment/license-back in which case they should probably
use a better drafted license anyway).

Note the QPL also has other restrictions you may find problematic, for
instance being tied to the jurisdiction of Oslo (unless you happen
to be based in Norway when it would probably suit).

Alex