Are implicit dual-licensing agreements inherently anti-open?

[David Barrett]

Michael Bernstein wrote:
> This will most
> likely have the effect of discouraging both a free software community
> (other than part-time noodling and some bugfixes) and a proprietary
> vendor ecology (other than superficial rebranding) from growing around
> the OVPL code
 > ...
> What was it you were hoping to accomplish with this license, again?

Well I can't speak to anyone else's intent, but my interest is in using 
the OVPL to license the core, shared infrastructure, and having a clean 
API beyond which contributors can create plugins using any license (open 
source or commercial, their choice).

Thus I'm primarily looking for contributors to supply bugfixes to the 
infrastructure as well as refactor the API in order to support their 
plugins.  The bulk of their work, however, would go into their own 
plugins, which are licensed however they see fit (GPL, BSD, commercial, 
etc.).

The OVPL is interesting to me because it allows me to keep a modicum of 
control over the infrastructure, as well as maintain future commercial 
licensing opportunities, while still encouraging a diverse community of 
plugin developers.  Furthermore, in the process of users developing and 
testing their plugins, I hope that the developers find ways to fix and 
improve the shared infrastructure on which all depend.

So far as I can tell, no other license gives me the flexibility 
necessary to do what I want.  Whether it'll work in my specific case 
remains to be determined, but this is the overall thrust of my goal.

-david