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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