On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Eric Fernandez wrote:
> There is another thing to consider about that double licensing scheme :
> Mandrake will not be able to accept external patches on their code,
> because these patches would be also GPL, and so their code could not
> remain under double licensing (if they do not have the agreement of the
> author of the patches, which is generally the case when there are a lot
> of contributors). I am worried by the fact it would slow down the
> application of patches in their code, since they would have to write
> themselves all corrections to vulnerabilities, if they do not want to
> loose the release under "commercial-proprietary" licence. I only hope
> they have not opened a new Pandora's box here.
There are two possible solutions to this:
1)The patch is assigned copyright to Mandrakesoft. This may not be
possible in some contries (Germany?).
2)The patch could be released under a less strict license (BSD, Artistic
etc) individually of the source, allowing it to be used by Mandrakesoft
for commercial purposes, and for the GPL version.
This of course ignores software which is under more strict license than
GPL (which requires the non-GPL license).
> So I think that when the sources are available, this kind of software
> will at the medium or long term be forked.
Having software under GPL or not does not cause it to be forked, or not.
See OpenOffice.org, Mozilla for multi-licensed software that will probably
never be forked, and sourceforge for GPL sofware that has been forked ...
Regards,
Buchan
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