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Comment by jakobe | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the link, those were some good thoughts on the topic. However, I disagree with Stallman. (probably because I make a living from selling something that he might call a 'proprietary extensions')

I think the problem I have with the practice of selling exceptions is that it gives more rights to the owner. I feel that open source licenses should give equal rights to everyone. Dual licenses undermine that equality. I understand that people want to stay in control of their software, but for me the words 'free' and 'open' somehow imply 'equal rights for everyone'.

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The GPL is meant to preserve equal rights for everyone other than the owner. A more permissive license allows freeloading, while the GPL does not.

I wasn't talking about GPL, but the combination GPL+copyright assignment.

I see. You would like it if anyone could sell exceptions, not just the copyright holders. Hm. I'd have to think about this.

This is what permissive licenses allow for.

But they provide no hard incentive for someone to pay in order to benefit non-freely from free software. I prefer to attack the problem from the point of view of figuring out what proper revenue sharing would be with copyright assignments. What the MIT guys are doing with FFTW is doing is good. What Oracle is doing with MySQL and Virtualbox is bad.

I'll ask the FFTW guys what do they do about external contributions.

Also, thinking about it more, there is nothing wrong with copyright holders having extra rights as long as they do not use these rights abusively. After all, they did the work, so they deserve to be compensated for it. Nobody would dispute that. It is problematic if they use these extra rights to try to make people pay for proprietary software that is not otherwise available freely. This is what I dislike about what Oracle does.

> After all, they did the work, so they deserve to be compensated for it.

The problem is that many Open Source projects aren't created by an individual, or even a single company. Large projects have hundreds of contributors. If a project requires copyright assignment, all these contributors have fewer rights than the maintainer of the project.

If a project doesn't require coypright assignment, and uses a single license, all contributors have equal rights to the collective work.

> The problem is that many Open Source projects aren't created by an individual, or even a single company. Large projects have hundreds of contributors.

It's some sort of empirical law that almost all of the code in free projects is written by at most a handful of all contributors. If this law holds, and I can think of only few examples where it doesn't, it seem fair for the tiny minority to benefit the most from selling exceptions.

What the FSF does when requesting copyright is a two-way agreement. The FSF drafts a contract that promises that they will never use the copyright aassignment for creating non-free software. Similar contracts could be drafted that agree to share revenue proportionally and provides clauses for arbitration if this proportion is in dispute.

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