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Comment by geokon | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit surprised "dual licensing" hasn't come up at all in this discussion. To me that is the most logical next-step from the GPL. (ex: The Qt/JUCE people are using it to great effect)

- If you want to work on expanding on what I started and then sharing it with everyone, then that's great!

- If you want to make money with my work - then lets get in touch and work out some compensation. Seems only fair.. no?

It's a little fuzzy because you can have opensource projects that make money, but it fits the general spirit of things.

Though I'm not sure how it would work if for instance someone sends you a merge request.... do they have to also send something signing over the rights to their work? Is there a better license that does this automatically?

(does anyone know how Qt handles that for example?)

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Well, I contributed to the dual licensed project, only to see the company increasing the price of their (somewhat related) monetized project 7 fold or so, screwing people over on the related product. Of course the contributors get nothing for their copyright assignment. It's like thank you for your contribution to our documentation system, now pay 7 times more for our main product you're also using.

I'm wary of these schemes as a potential contributor. It limits the reciprocity.

I'm much happier with projects that don't require free copyright assignment from their contributors.

Maybe I'm not understanding your point... you only pay if you want to use it in a closed source capacity. The alternative (just a vanilla copy-left license) would mean it's simply impossible to use in a closed source project at all.

So if all you do is write open source software, there is no difference for you. And if you write closed source software (or some project/client suddenly requires it of your for some reason) then you have something you can do.

It seems like a win-win?

Yes, indeed. The submitter needs to sign over copyright. Otherwise you don't have the right to relicense their work under some other for-compensation license. All GNU projects require copyright assignment, for an example. The GPL license is silent on copyright assignment of pull requests, so you have to execute a document outside the license. I believe some other open source licenses address this directly, but I'm not sure which ones.

I haven't had a use for it myself, but it seems like it would be a nice thing for Github/lab to facilitate.

Maybe it'd be possible to somehow do it cleanly from within git? Have a license-transfer file that reading

FOR ALL WORK PERFORMED ON THIS REPOSITORY THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE TRANSFER ALL COPYRIGHT RIGHTS TO [name of owner] :

John Smith

Bob Bobberson

Whatever Whateverson

etc.

It's a little clunky.. a better solution would need some git integration I'd imagine. Maybe someone has a better idea? :)

Yes, it would be nice to be able to set up a click-through for pull requests.

> Yes, indeed. The submitter needs to sign over copyright. Otherwise you don't have the right to relicense their work under some other for-compensation license.

Wouldn't it be possible to require patches to be supplied under CC-0, which would allow the maintainer to take the patch and incorporate it in the GPLed source?

CC0 is a disclaimer of copyright, so yes. The essential test you need to pass for dual licensing is "no one else has copyright in this work". Good clarifying question.

IANAL

>It's a little fuzzy because you can have opensource projects that make money

As I see it, the purpose of copyleft is not to prevent anyone from making money; if someone does want to use a copylefted work to make money, they'll just have to play fair and release their source code under the same license.

In other words, what copyleft prevents is predatory use of "open source" which involves taking eagerly without giving back.

Right, but doesn't this ends up giving SaaS and server side businesses a weird kinda-nonsensical advantage?

I'm thinking, say you make some innovative new algo using GPL software. If you try to distribute it to your customers you end up having to give away the "secret sauce". You'd have no business b/c anyone can just take your work and recompile it

So you only have two solutions:

1 - You run it on your own servers and just provide an API to the "cloud" (ie. what Facebook/Google do with the majority of their software) Then you don't have to share anything!

2 - You redo all the GPL ground work and work from the smaller pool of more permissively licensed software

So maybe that's why "cloud" solutions are so huge now? They can reap all the benefits of the GPL world and keep their competitive advantage. But my bigger concern is that there seem to be whole classes of software that can't be put into the cloud - and they're stuck making peanuts (providing "customer support" or whatever companies like RedHat do) or having to do a lot more work. Meanwhile the talent pool gets sucked up working in the cloud b/c it's easier money

I'm probably going to step on some toes here, but I have essentially the same concern when it comes to "getting rid of software patents". To me the net effect seems either everything just ends up getting hidden in the cloud or being economically unfeasible.

> Right, but doesn't this ends up giving SaaS and server side businesses a weird kinda-nonsensical advantage?

Or "appliance" vendors. SaaS and hardware appliances are two delivery mechanisms that leverage loopholes in GPL requirements.

That's where the AGPL comes in.

Of course, Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) providers could hide their use of AGPL code. But the owner of that code could promise a reward for whistleblowers. That would deter most predators from misappropriating AGPL code.

iText PDF is a popular Java library that does this: http://itextpdf.com/Pricing

I'm not 100% sure but I think the GPL prevents itself from being used in a dual license scenario on purpose.

No, to find the answer, fall back to copyright law. If you own the copyright to some body of code in entirety, you can license it under as many licenses as you want. GPL for the community, proprietary trade-secret in exchange for money, and everything works fine.

But.... if you take a pull request from someone, either they have to sign over copyright to their patch, or else you have to involve them in every relicensing negotiation, because now they are a copyright holder, too, in the work.

It doesn't. There's nothing a "license" can do to prevent that. If I own the copyright to something, and I license it to party A under license X and party B under license Y, that's perfectly legal. This happens all the time in the commercial world where big software licenses are often written per-customer. If you make one of those licenses a blanket GPLv3 grant to the whole world, that's perfectly fine.

Where it gets sticky is the "ownership" issue. This only works if you're the sole copyright holder. If you've taken contributions from community members to your GPL project, you can't then relicense those to anyone else without approval, of course. This is the big reason behind the desire on the part of big projects for copyright assignment aggreements. Even the FSF does it so they can migrate software to GPLv4 when needed.

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