Open Letter to OpenVPN developers and users
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This message is primarily directed at individuals who have submitted or plan
to submit source code patches to the OpenVPN project.
I've been considering various ways that the OpenVPN project might become
financially self-sustaining. While this has been discussed in the past, the
discussion usually centered around donations. I'd like to propose and invite
discussion on another potential fundraising method.
Hans Reiser (ReiserFS developer) and separately the MySQL project have
pioneered a dual-licensing scheme where the source code remains under the GPL
license, but can be alternatively licensed under a standard commercial license
that allows customers to modify the code or link with non-open-source code,
without being required to publish their changes. Funding is generated by
selling commercial licenses to the same codebase which is available to the
general public under the GPL. As Hans Reiser bemuses, the commercial license
amounts to "taxing money from those who can't convince their investors they
should share their code with us."
Being able to sell commercial licenses would bring badly needed funding into
the OpenVPN project to help with the increasing workload of maintainance,
support, etc., and ensure that OpenVPN continues to evolve in the direction of
becoming a universal open source VPN solution. While most OpenVPN users would
continue to use the GPL license, an example of the type of user who might want
a commercial license would be someone who wants to sell a network appliance
which uses a modified version of OpenVPN as the security layer, and who wants
to keep their modifications proprietary.
Of course, if software is licensed under the GPL, only the copyright holder
for the software is legally entitled to dual-license under a different,
non-GPL license agreement.
Therefore, in order for a dual licensing scheme to work, anyone who has ever
submitted code to the OpenVPN source code would need to agree to the dual
licensing scheme, since their code might now be potentially licensed under a
commercial license (in addition to the GPL).
There are different forms in which this agreement can be legally stated:
Here is Hans Reiser's version:
http://namesys.com/legalese.html
I'd like to invite some discussion on this idea, and I'd especially like
feedback from past OpenVPN contributors as to whether this is something they
could agree to.
Best Regards,
James
