Canonical, Ltd. On Record: Seeking Open Core

Re:Canonical, Ltd. On Record: Seeking Open Core by bad_user on Sunday October 17, 2010 @07:27PM (#1801734)

You are right, but personally I feel that the GPL is inviting abuse: it is THE license that made the dual-licensing business model possible, and the reason why companies are requesting copyright assignments (even if they don't plan to do anything with it right now, but just in case).

So you can talk about "the spirit of GPL", but this spirit is too tainted with a political agenda that made it a double edged sword.

Heck, the biggest supporters of AGPL are companies that sell web-related platforms or libraries for a living and slapping an "open-source" label on such packages is good marketing.

Here's some food for thought: if OpenJDK would've been licensed with Apache version 2, a fork would have already happened. GPLv2 was chosen for a reason ;)

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Re:Canonical, Ltd. On Record: Seeking Open Core by bkuhn on Monday October 18, 2010 @12:41PM (#1804155)

You're quite correct, the Open Core model (and, to some extent, the proprietary relicensing system as well) is made possible because of the way copyleft works. I've previously written that <a href="http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/10/16/open-core-shareware... is only a tool, and the tool can be used for good things and bad things too</a>. I also agree that permissive licensing is <em>much better</em> than GPL+OpenCore.

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Re:Canonical, Ltd. On Record: Seeking Open Core by clacke on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @12:51AM (#1806266)

Here's the thing: The GPL combined with copyright assignments makes the dual-licensing business model possible. This is why we need to study carefully how this is done, and consider the consequences of assigning copyright.

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