Dual licensing GPL for fame and profit

Re:Dual licensing GPL for fame and profit by saagarjha on Sunday October 04, 2020 @06:09AM (#24677718)

From an entirely moral perspective, dual licensing GPL never really felt right to me. You’re basically giving the people who are the most likely to not care one bit about the license an “out” where they don’t have to respect it anymore. If you claim your project is GPL but I’m using an device with some derivative of that project’s code in it but I can’t get the source, then I’m not getting the benefits of it being GPL.

Really, I think the title is the best explanation of this strategy: you want companies to pay you; you don’t really do this if you care about the freedoms that GPL is meant to preserve. In this case the only purpose of using the GPL is that it scares big companies into paying you and lets individual projects use it for free.

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Re:Dual licensing GPL for fame and profit by george3d6 on Sunday October 04, 2020 @06:24AM (#24677783)

> you don’t really do this if you care about the freedoms that GPL is meant to preserve

I mean, if this was the case, why provide the source at all ? Or why make it free to use forever ? Why not release it under a license that states usage is only permitted as long as the author allows it, i.e. for a limited trial period ?

My point here is that you can be pragmatic and say:

If some people want to build a free world, fine, I agree with that idea in principle and I will provide my work to them for free.

On the other hand, most people want a paid world, which is also fine, I might as well provide my service to them as well and benefit from it.

You're not doing as much as releasing stuff under GPL-only would, in that you're giving people that pay you an out, but it seems to be better than nothing. Plus, it's a more positive approach than GPL, in that it's not actively "hurting" people that don't want to join the open source community (by not providing them any option to use the product), it's simply giving an advantage to the open source users.

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Re:Dual licensing GPL for fame and profit by saagarjha on Sunday October 04, 2020 @01:29PM (#24680673)

> I mean, if this was the case, why provide the source at all ? Or why make it free to use forever ? Why not release it under a license that states usage is only permitted as long as the author allows it, i.e. for a limited trial period ?

I am specifically making the argument that by doing this you don’t care about the freedoms that the GPL was intended to preserve. Being “open source” without having the other freedoms is desirable to some but I believe not in the spirit of the GPL, so what you really have is a project you claim under one license but you are distributing it on the side with principles that directly oppose it.

> If some people want to build a free world, fine, I agree with that idea in principle and I will provide my work to them for free.

Well, what I’m saying is that the two principles seem directly opposed. To me it feels like you’re operating what you call a humanitarian blood bank where 100% of donations go to people need-blind, but if you add $5 on top of your “donation” you’ll instead sell it on the black market and give me 50% of the price it fetched (let’s assume this was not illegal). If your mission is “I want to help everyone” then this directly undermines that; but if you’re OK with “but my sales on the side help me fund the entire thing so that the actual donations can exist” that’s just another perspective (and possibly a valid one) but it’s not fair to characterize yourself as purely only thinking about running it as a service to only get blood to the people who need it.

> it's a more positive approach than GPL, in that it's not actively "hurting" people that don't want to join the open source community

The GPL wants to hurt people who don’t join the open source community. Like, it actively is designed around that because it believes members of the community who do not participate violate the freedoms of the open source community, and it tries to get people to do this by leveraging one of the few things the open source community has: the projects themselves. Again, whether that is an accurate representation is up to you, but using the license as a stick to prod companies into paying you so they can do the very thing the license was designed to prevent just seems ironic and that’s what I was getting at.

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Re:Dual licensing GPL for fame and profit by l3s2d on Sunday October 04, 2020 @08:34PM (#24683471)

I think you're right in that it is somewhat against the spirit of the GPL. That said, I'd like to offer another perspective: Dual-licensing with the GPL allows for the open sourcing of programs that would otherwise have been proprietary. I think this benefit greatly outweighs the moral quandary. The potential for forking alone is a huge boon to the open source community.

RMS's thoughts on dual-licensing: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions

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Re:Dual licensing GPL for fame and profit by jcelerier on Sunday October 04, 2020 @06:37AM (#24677853)

> On the other hand, most people want a paid world, which is also fine,

that's where there's gonna be some disagreement

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Re:Dual licensing GPL for fame and profit by jka on Sunday October 04, 2020 @07:38AM (#24678202)

Slightly tongue-in-cheek, perhaps: the people who benefit from a paid world might want a paid world, while they might also want to continue to reduce their costs.

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