Excerpts from "Interview: Bruce Perens Answers Open Source License
Questions" at http://slashdot.org/interviews/99/07/30/2220240.shtml
"If you are the copyright holder of a program, you may issue that program
under any number of licenses simultaneously. While you can't take the GPL
back once you release a GPL-ed version, there is nothing that compels you to
release later versions under the GPL. But this is all ignoring the issue of
other people's contributions to your program.
The situation is much more complicated when other people contribute. They
own the copyright to their modifications.
You can deal with this in several ways if you want to keep the option to
distribute your work under a different license:
1. Simply don't use their contributions in your commercial product.
2. Insist that they sign the copyright of the modifications over to you
before you before you will put any of their modifications in your main
source thread. This is what FSF does, so that they have the option to revise
the GPL later on without having to go to everybody who made a modification
and ask their permission.
3. Use a license like the Netscape Public License that gives you the right
to distribute contributed modifications under other licenses. Note, however,
that the NPL only requires that for modifications to your files, and that if
someone creates a separate file and links it in, they are not required to
give you the right to distribute that file under other licenses. Of course
you can write your own license that says something different. "

 ---
Who cares whether or not you can use the CD?  That's not the issue here I am
afraid.
When I started this thread I was more concerned with knowing what direction
Idaya was going in.  It's not really an issue of whether it's free or not.
The product is damn good.  I don't mind paying.  But...
What I do mind is this "sucker you into paying" tactic that Idaya is
employing.  Come on!  Get serious.  All you are managing to do is p***
people off.  Nickel and diming your way to a commercial product is not going
to achieve anything positive.
That said, here is a solution.  I will be creating a distribution of the CVS
version of freeVSD (as is anyone's right based on the GPL) so that others
can download it.  If it's really that much trouble for Idaya to do this,
then I will sacrifice my time to get it done.  If anyone has a tar ball
they'd like to contribute or simply wants to help with this please let me
know.  The site will be at rfreevsd.sourceforge.net (should be available in
24 hours).  The "R" is for "Recent".  If you want to participate in
maintaining "Recent" releases let me know and I will add you to the project.
I hope that this furthers the objectives of maintaining a readily available
distribution for download.  I don't believe in forking code; that is not the
intention of this.
Thanks,
Pablo




-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Tim Sellar
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2001 1:44 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: GPL or not?


> proVSD will be based on freeVSD... in what way ? Will proVSD use
> the same code,
> but simply extend it ? If that's the case, proVSD has to be
> released as GPL as
> well.
>

Actually this is incorrect. For an example of how dual-licensing of software
can lead to better software for everyone follow this:
http://www.winterspeak.com/columns/102901.html

> People who discovered freeVSD through some kind of link were
> always able to
> download it and try it. But when you start pulling everything
> away from people
> who 'may be interested', they will immediately back off. They
> want to try the
> software before they spend money, even if it's very cheap. And I
> don't think you
> can blame them, can you ?

People are still free to try the software. Everything save for the latest
release is available in easily installable packages. Only the latest
release, for the time being, requires the additional overhead of fetching
and building.

>
> Personally, I'm very interested in deploying freeVSD on a large
> scale, but it
> needs a lot more work before I can get that done. I'm willing to
> implement these
> features :
> - Load balancing for Apache, Qmail and MySQL (all 3 tested so far
> and working
> fine outside freeVSD)
> - Failover system guaranteeing 100% uptime for Apache, Qmail and
> MySQL with
> shared disk array (MySQL is tough on shared disk array though,
> still working on
> that)
> - Use of a distributed file system with replication, again adding to the
> redundancy of the solution
> These are the reasons why I was asking for a clear layout of how
> freeVSD was
> designed last week. I had the intention to begin development as
> soon as possible.
> But seeing how things are evolving now, I might as well throw all
> those ideas
> away and start building a new virtual server system, specifically
> designed for
> 100% availability.
>

As I have previously said, freeVSD is not going away. If you were intending
to contribute code you would have to be using CVS in any event, and you
still can.

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