On Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 22:06:09 UTC, Iain Buclaw via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
GPL can be summarised in four simple freedoms. Nothing
complicated there.
The problems come up when you get into the details of how to
write those "freedoms" into legalese, for example, the whole
dynamic linking issue. While they now claim that dynamic linking
requires full GPL compliance, that's not actually written in the
GPLv2 license.
In any case, you do know that there are paid gpl software too,
right?
Ardour is a good example of this.
http://ardour.org/download.html
I had not heard of Ardour using such a paid model, so I just
looked it up. Turns out the lead dev of Ardour announced last
month that he had to shift focus from the project because it
isn't bringing in much money (http://lwn.net/Articles/604718/),
which is exactly what I predicted in my article four years ago
because it has happened countless times already.
I'll note that the one guy who was able to build a sustainable
business for a GPL software product before dual-licensing was the
original ghostscript developer, who sold a closed GUI frontend
along with the open GPL backend, which was apparently legal
because the two were separate executables. He started a
successful software company that made millions off this early
mixed model decades ago.
