[License-discuss] Intimacy in open source (SSPL and AGPL)

[Bruce Perens]

>   for MySQL.

Oops. MariaDB. Monty.

On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 1:57 PM Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 1:35 PM Gil Yehuda via License-discuss <
> license-discuss at lists.opensource.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> 2. The other is a commercial motivation to construct license terms that
>> are permissive enough to get attention and adoption by curious (employed)
>> developers, but "threatening" enough to convert their companies into
>> licensors of the commercial terms.
>>
>
> This is a motivation of dual licensing companies, but not a motivation of
> FSF at all. And from the company perspective, license FUD has sometimes
> been a motivator, but in most cases they have a reason to pay other than
> compulsion.
>
>
>> They are in the business of selling protection from the license threats
>> they create.
>>
>
> That sounds a lot more draconian than it should. Many of them are happy to
> allow you to use their software under terms like the GPL without charge,
> and offer additional rights for a price. I don't think even Richard
> Stallman objects to people offering additional rights for money.
>
>
>> you have to include the second group who clearly believe in creating
>> proprietary software (their "enterprise editions"), but who use the tools
>> created by those who do not, in order to convert interest into revenue from
>> employees who don't quite understand the parameters of these licenses.
>>
>
> If the employees don't understand, that is an internal problem of the
> company. In my own trainings I do go over what you do for the company and
> why, and I enable employees to understand the licenses (but not to make
> decisions without counsel) because they are the first line of defense
> against intellectual property problems within the company. In general where
> I have done this training, issues are brought to us by engineers rather
> than first popping up in a Black Duck or Palamida scan.
>
> I do understand the motivations of the companies who are looking at
> license innovations, and I help them off of OSI lists. I can't talk about a
> lot of that, but you will notice that I worked on the Business Source
> license for MySQL.
>
> Unfortunately, a lot of what the companies want to do can't be achieved as
> Open Source, and it is best that all sides understand that and go on.
>
>     Thanks
>
>     Bruce
>
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