On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 8:49 AM, Chris Bennett <[email protected]
> wrote:
>
>
> I always prefer BSD or even more permissive licensing.
> If someone can then sell a proprietary version, they might be willing to
> submit a module with the same kind of licensing. No guarantee of that,
> of course. But why not?
>
I think there are larger issues actually than whether someone can release a
proprietary version. Permissive licensing largely means that we do not
assert control over the work of others, and we trust them to make decent
and ethical decisions in the contexts in which they find themselves, and
that there is established a commons which everyone may access. Those who
release proprietary versions get to show the community what features may be
needed, and very typically they will either be under pressure to give back
what they have done or go their own way, often in later competition with
the community. If we assert that software freedom is economically
valuable, then free software will win out all things being equal. I assume
that those who build their businesses on free/open source software see the
economic benefits of this approach and prefer not to pay people for the
privilege of restricting what we can do with our software....
> There is something else that does happen. Companies close. People
> retire. A contract for their software may end. Sometimes people die.
> This actually happened to me during one project.
> All of their proprietary software may suddenly become available with a
> BSD license.
>
I suspect proprietary software is unlikely to go this route. The closest
example I can think of is OpenIndiana (a fork of OpenSolaris). When
companies go under, they usually like to try to sell interests in things to
other companies. However in the end, it doesn't really matter. FreeBSD is
still today much more prevalent than OpenIndiana is, and it has stronger
development behind it. PostgreSQL is becoming the default RDBMS people
associate with open source. Programs that spend years developing their
commons typically outcompete everyone else eventually.
BSD licenses work well because they create common ground between companies,
each of which may have a proprietary version. Everyone has an incentive to
expand the commons in every direction other than their niche, so for mature
programs today, I have trouble seeing them as viable unless they are open
source or niche markets. Even what starts out as a niche market can become
a full market for a BSD-licensed project.
Consider Green Plum which started off as a good corporate member of the
PostgreSQL community but no longer contributes anything back. They offer,
as a proprietary product, basically a massively multi-parallel version of
PostgreSQL. However because they don't contribute back they are stuck on
an older version of the code, and miss out on new features. Additionally,
now Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, along with some others, have put
together a BSD-licensed massively multiparallel version of PostgreSQL
called Postgres-XC. Green Plum is now stuck working on an old version of
the code and in competition with open source solutions... not a good place
to be. Green plum may never be open source, but Postgres-XC is a viable,
open alternative.
I don't really have a problem with proprietary solutions on the margins.
If a market is viable, the community will move in, and there may be some
things that open source business models can't yet reach.
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
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