I'd be *shocked* if anyone on license-discuss was willing to give you free legal advice. You need to consult a lawyer about this (you'll probably get a number of contacts at least from your email).
In general, you need to figure out what your business goals are and then consult with a lawyer to find the best license choices for your particular goals. Dual-licensing is a means to an end which several other companies have used successfully but much depends on the composition of your codebase, the market conditions you are dealing with, the types of partners you wish to attract, etc.
Danese Cooper
Clint Oram wrote:
Hi there -
We are building a professional open source company and are curious which
open source license you suggest we use. Our goal is to build a profitable
company around dual licensing - providing an open source version of our
product and a commercial version of the product. We feel that a software company built around an open source product will
first significantly reduce our sales and marketing costs. Second, we expect
the open source version will greatly reduce barriers-to-entry to our product
from both a partner ecosystem perspective and more importantly a customer
acquisition perspective. Finally, we flat out believe that delivering an
open source product will enable users/customers to have a more direct voice
in the building of the product which will result in a better product.
We plan to translate this combination of factors into a lower cost product
offering that will delight end-users.
Our goals for the open source license and commercial license are:
1. Enable partners and customers to easily enhance/enrich/expand the product
through "GPL-like" conditions
2. Allow our company to roll 'contributed open source code' into our
commercial release. What do you think about the Mozilla Public License? Or
the eCos open source license (
<http://ecos.sourceware.org/license-overview.html>
http://ecos.sourceware.org/license-overview.html)
3. The ability to sell our open source code line as a commercial release
a. With additional modules contributed to our open source project
b. With additional value-add modules not in the open source product c. With full support, maintenance, warranty and indemnification
So with that said, which open source license do you think best meets those
goals?
I appreciate your advice.
Clint
Clint Oram
Co-Founder and VP Products & Services
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(650) 315-6321
SUGARCRM Inc. It's a sweet deal.
Startup in residence at the SDForum <http://www.sdforum.org/>
http://www.sdforum.org
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