Nadav Har'El wrote:
By the way, this issue isn't Academic only. I have seen companies looking to buy the full rights to some open source program, which will allow them to do anything with they code they buy without ANY strings attached. It appears that (for reasons we just discussed), only the copyright holder of the program can do that. This may be an interesting way to make money for writers of free software - everybody can copy their software, but only they have the ability to relicense it arbitrarily to fit the requirements of proprietary software makers.
This model is followed by MySQL AB, Mozilla and some other companies/projects.
The problem is that if someone outside of the company contributes a patch to the software in question, he has basically two choices:
1. Allow (e.g. by assigning the copyright on the patch to the company) the company to use the patch under the same terms as its other software i.e. the company is allowed to distribute proprietary modifications of the patch to its proprietary licensees. This partially defeats the advantage of GPL.
2. License the patch under strict GPL, forcing a fork in the software - there will be two versions. One version would be dual-licensed, and the other version - GPL-only. This defeats the advantage of the dual-licensing model.
--- Omer My own blog is at http://www.livejournal.com/users/tddpirate/
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