David Brown wrote:
On Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 01:26:24AM -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
The second issue is that dual licenses aren't quite as benign as
everybody seems to think. See:
http://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/why-licenses-dont-matter-and-why-they-do/
Basically, it boils down to the fact that the GPL places enough
restrictions on what you can do with software that the copyright
holder can effectively apply a shakedown that you will have to fight
if you touch non-open software anywhere in your use of the package.
The argument made there really doesn't have anything to do with the MySQL
being under a dual license, that's just them trying to confuse things.
Their claim is that a particular use might infringe in the GPL. They may
offer dual licensing as an extortion clause, but their recourse isn't any
different than it would be if they didn't offer the dual license.
That is 100% true. However, a dual licensed codebase tends to have two
things that combine to make this a bigger threat:
1) A unified copyright holder since the business insists on a copyright
assignment. This means that you don't have a handful of contributors
who might get mad and pull their code if some project gets too nasty.
2) Actual money behind a set of lawyers to come after you
The difference between the way the FSF enforces the GPL and a business
is that the FSF is probably not going to go after you if you try to play
mostly by the rules with maybe a bit of non-compliance. Whereas, the
business might be motivated to go after you for even trivial infractions
if it suits their business purposes.
It's kind of ironic that the LGPL which RMS so despises may turn out to
offer better freedom than the GPL since no businesses are interested in
a dual-license model when someone could just fork the code anyhow.
-a
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