Dual Licensing Woes

[der.hans]

Am 20. Jan, 2007 schwätzte Joshua Zeidner so:

moin moin jmz,

>  Recently I have run into yet another company who is 'dual licensing' a
> GPL based code base.  In my estimation, none of the principles that these
> companies base their business on is sound.  In essence, they are somehow
> reserving special rights to a GPL project, and selling those rights as a
> product( typically packaged with support services ).  In many cases, I am
> obliged to publish any additions I make to the code base( as is proper to
> the GPL ), but under some unstipulated clause they are allowed to sell
> rights not only to the code base, but to the additions that I have committed
> back to the 'community'.  Something doesn't make sense here, and the real
> basis of the problem is there is no legal precedence in this area at all.

Actually, there's plenty or precedence to dual-licensing between a Free
Software license and a proprietary license. See OpenOffice.org (
proprietary version is StarOffice ) and MySQL.

http://about.OpenOffice.org/index.html
http://www.MySQL.com/company/legal/licensing/

For the Sun projects they've had really ugly legal things to agree to in
order for them to accept code for the project repository. Some of the
legal stuff is making sure the submitter claims the code and accepts legal
responsibility for false claims and making sure the submitter allows the code
to be used by the project.

I think the Sun agreement also has the submitter assigning copyright to
the OO.o project or Sun. I'm certain that the submitter has to agree to
allow Sun to use the code in StarOffice.

The Sun agreements are rumored to be like the old AT&T tainted licenses.
Once you agree to them, you can't ever hold anything back from Sun again.

I've heard the Sun agreements, like the Sun licensing, has improved over
the years.

> It almost feels like a scam that is harnessing the public energy and input
> towards personal( or corporate ) profit.  Once the code is GPL it is public
> and no person or entity reserves the right to license the code in any way(
> at least that is my understanding ).

The GPL is explicitly reserving the right to license the code :), but I
think that's not what you meant ;-).

If the author has assigned copyright to Sun Sun can do anything it wants
with the code. I'm pretty certain that's how things are setup for OO.o. I
know the agreement was sufficiently ugly that I never considered actually
reading it or submitting code. I can't afford to pay a lawyer enough to
find out what the agreement says.

If you don't like the setup, that's fine. Fork the project.

You can't just shove stuff into the Linux kernel. You have to get
permission from the maintainers and they have rules about how they'll
accept code.

GNU Enterprise ( completely and utterly devoted Free Software ) requires
something similar to what Sun has for OO.o. It's not to allow them to
release GNUe as proprietary software ( which they might be able to do ),
rather to make sure they can use submitted code and to make sure they can
go after someone for copyright infringement.

My project and my repository == my rules. If it's GPL and my rules
suckath, then the project can be forked or the code slurped into a
different project.

That has happened recently with Inkscape and Xorg successfully coming
out of forks and neiter was due to proprietary issues. Joomla! is also a
successful fork, but one due to problems with the proprietary side.

ciao,

der.hans
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