Some rambling thoughts: If the intention is to promote
open source, then it doens't make sense to make the
code available under any license other than GPL. If
the intent is to earn good karma through open
sourcing/GPL and also make the product financially
viable by selling to those who can afford it under
more restrictive license, who benefits financially? Is
it the open source developer who contributes time and
code, or is it just the company. My intention is to understand the business model
behind companies like MySQL and JBoss (and trolltech,
Codeweavers, transgaming) a little bit better. Any
comments/clarifications?
IMHO,
1. The standard wider developer base - Opening up a product like this makes thousands of skilled programmers looking at it and making it more robust. In a simple business logic, you require only a few highly skilled people (like trolltech does) to maintain such an extensive cross-platform commercial toolkit. Of course, to start with, your product should be good enough for these thousands on (unpaid) skilled programmers looking at it and making it more robust. Because of this kind of licensing, projects like KDE have sprung up - can you think of a better commercial development model? Here is a commercial project, which if close sourced would require 10x more people to maintain. And think about the kind of test bed that QT has today, spread over n number of OSes! As far as I remember, QT started out in a very raw shape - over time it has become so much more complete in all ways, simply because of this helpful community around it.
2. The dual licensing is a very tempting way to induce people into buying licenses. Your in-house developers can take a close look at the API, the visual IDE. Both the developers and the management can take a look at the available software and see what is possible.
It is just another model of doing business. There is no one way of making money. Some people simply are not comfortable enough thinking how their licences might be violated in such an arrangement - maybe the likes of M$ might be a good example - they simply dont want to leave any stone unturned in how to make money out of every possible opportunity.
On the other end, people like Trolltech are more permissive - they know fully well that there will be the occasional person abusing the freedom that they have got. However, they rather concentrate on the good people - and how to increase their ilk as part of their business. And they believe (like I do), that there are enough good people in this world to make a living out of, ... and more importantly they are satisfied with that.
- Sandip
-- Sandip Bhattacharya http://www.sandipb.net sandip at puroga.com Puroga Technologies Pvt. Ltd. http://www.puroga.com
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