Dual Licensing Woes

Sat Jan 20 20:18:43 MST 2007

On 1/20/07, der.hans <PLUGd at lufthans.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

 Hi Hans,

   I think there needs to be some clarification here; Dual licensing refers
not to a software system that has two sets of code with different licenses,
I use it to mean what Darrin describes in a later message.  'Dual licensing'
is the practice of imposing different and  possibly contradictory licensing
agreements on a code base for different situations.  It is becoming
increasing common in the OSS world.

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.

  This is one of the problems, it would appear that 'Dual Licensing' may
prohibit you from doing this.  If forking is possible, then the only product
that makes sense for company to offer is a support agreement.

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.

  I fully understand the fork effect and how it acts as a regulator in these
cases.  I will continue this argument with Darrin's post as he is addressing
some of these issues directly.

  As always, thanks for your valuable input.  JMZ

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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> Brin
>
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-- 
.0000. communication.
.0001. development.
.0010. strategy.
.0100. appeal.

JOSHUA M. ZEIDNER
IT Consultant

++power; ++perspective; ++possibilities;
( 602 ) 490 8006
jjzeidner at gmail.com
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