GPL and commercial licensing, Amphora product

[John Cowan]

Jüri Kaljundi wrote:

 > What we would like to do is to make potentially the free Amphora
 > Light license a bit more relaxed, and for that we have considered
 > starting to use the GPL License for the freeware version. The
 > question is that we still would like to keep selling the full
 > version, which is based on the free version. Do I understand it
 > correctly, that under GPL license we could not do that, and the
 > full commercial version would also have to be free in case it
 > includes any GPL code?

If all the code is written by you, or more accurately if
you hold the copyright on all of it, then you can license it
for both GPL and non-GPL use.

Any contributed code under the GPL could not be used by you
in your non-GPLed version unless the contributor signs
the copyright over to you.

 > Or can we as the copyright holder still use the GPL product code in
 > our full version by initially double-licensing it?

Just so.

 > How is MySQL doing it? They say they use GPL license, but they do
 > not allow commercial use or packaging with commercial products?

Note that "commercial" is not "proprietary".  There are many
commercial applications that are free software.

Anyway, MySQL requires a paid license if you either link your
(non-free) code directly with MySQL, or if it requires MySQL
and you ship it with MySQL included.  (MySQL client-side code
is not included in this rule, since it is LGPLed.)

-- 
John Cowan <jcowan at reutershealth.com>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_

--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3