Hi,
I would like to
release some software with dual licensing. I have heard of this being done with
GPL and a seperate commercial license; however, I need to allow the open source
code to link with non-free software - this seems to exclude
GPL.
So, the next obvious
consideration seems to be a dual license using LGPL. That solves the above
problem, but does it introduce new problems?...
What about
contributions from 3rd parties - would they be discouraged from contributing
with the knowledge that their contributions could be exploited (exploitation
seems to be possible anyway with most non-GPL-based open source licenses
since they allow private forking).
Under a LGPL
dual-license, reasons to pay for the commercial license (rather than sticking
with the LGPL side) include not being forced to distribute the source code,
the freedom to fork the code privately,
re-licensing permission, or some other 'special' privileges.
Does this make
sense, or am I missing something? Is dual-licensing a dangerous game or is it a
good compromise, allowing both commercial exploitation for those that are
prepared to pay for it and free use of the software for those that don't
want to pay.
Has anyone seen this
approach elsewhere?
Thanks for any new
perspectives/opinions that you can offer.
Regards,
Rghoo.
