Open Letter to OpenVPN developers and users -------------------------------------------
This message is primarily directed at individuals who have submitted or plan to submit source code patches to the OpenVPN project. I've been considering various ways that the OpenVPN project might become financially self-sustaining. While this has been discussed in the past, the discussion usually centered around donations. I'd like to propose and invite discussion on another potential fundraising method. Hans Reiser (ReiserFS developer) and separately the MySQL project have pioneered a dual-licensing scheme where the source code remains under the GPL license, but can be alternatively licensed under a standard commercial license that allows customers to modify the code or link with non-open-source code, without being required to publish their changes. Funding is generated by selling commercial licenses to the same codebase which is available to the general public under the GPL. As Hans Reiser bemuses, the commercial license amounts to "taxing money from those who can't convince their investors they should share their code with us." Being able to sell commercial licenses would bring badly needed funding into the OpenVPN project to help with the increasing workload of maintainance, support, etc., and ensure that OpenVPN continues to evolve in the direction of becoming a universal open source VPN solution. While most OpenVPN users would continue to use the GPL license, an example of the type of user who might want a commercial license would be someone who wants to sell a network appliance which uses a modified version of OpenVPN as the security layer, and who wants to keep their modifications proprietary. Of course, if software is licensed under the GPL, only the copyright holder for the software is legally entitled to dual-license under a different, non-GPL license agreement. Therefore, in order for a dual licensing scheme to work, anyone who has ever submitted code to the OpenVPN source code would need to agree to the dual licensing scheme, since their code might now be potentially licensed under a commercial license (in addition to the GPL). There are different forms in which this agreement can be legally stated: Here is Hans Reiser's version: http://namesys.com/legalese.html I'd like to invite some discussion on this idea, and I'd especially like feedback from past OpenVPN contributors as to whether this is something they could agree to. Best Regards, James
