Dual Licensing Woes

[der.hans]

Am 20. Jan, 2007 schwätzte Joshua Zeidner so:

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

>> 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.

I was referring to dual-licensing of the same code-base.

MySQL is the same code base with the GPL or with the proprietary license.

OpenOffice.org and StarOffice are both reportedly mostly the same
code-base. In fact, that code-base is a case of where it was under a
proprietary license and the GPL was added to it, just as Sun is now also
doing with Java.

Perl is released under contradictory Open Source licenses.

###
     This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
     it under the terms of either:

     a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
        Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any later
        version, or

     b) the "Artistic License" which comes with Perl.
###

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PerlLicense

I wish all software were released under the GPL. That would simplify
things for me and corporations wanting to use the software.

Dual-licensing with the GPL being one of the licenses is a compromise and
I think it's even one rms supports. I'm certain it's limited support at
best, though :).

ciao,

der.hans
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