Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 17:15:36 -0800 From: "Jason C. Wells" <jcw@highperformance.net> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: First to Dual License Wins? Message-ID: <4425EB38.5070604@highperformance.net>
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I was looking into Berkeley DB which presumably came out of Berkeley and was freebeer/freespeech software at it's inception. Berkeley DB is now more correctly called Sleepycat DB. One can only use Sleepycat as part of commercial software if one pays Sleepycat a license fee. A commonly stated position in the open source community is that if someone tries to take software into a closed or royalty based license model, that the code will just fork and development will continue on the new fork and the closed/not free code will die. That doesn't really seem to be the case with Sleepycat. I will go so far as to state the threat to fork the code to keep it free is an empty threat. So the first party to dual license some software and add a bit of value to the code in the process basically wins. A party interested in using some open source software that has a dual license model in a commercial application either has to pony up for the commercial license _or_ revert to a previous version of open source software that wasn't encumbered by the dual license. In this scenario, the first group of people to dual license some software gets to make money from the software while effectively locking out other would be entreprenures. I don't intend to pick on Sleepycat. They make a convenient example. I am trying to understand things as I pick out some libraries for a program of my own. I do realize that in my example Sleepycat was not required to do anything to build their commercial software from Berkeley DB. Sleepycat DB could have been completely closed source if Sleepycat had chosen to do so. I am not a hacker by training. If I were you savvy programmers, I would look for something indispensible and re-usable/linkable like Berkelely DB and take it commercial. Maybe you too could get bought out by Foo-acle. Later, Jason C. Wells
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