David Woodhouse wrote:
> My idea for the licensing of this product is to make it available under the
> GPL, and also to sell it, with support, under a more conventional commercial
> license.
> By placing it under GPL rather than LGPL we would prevent its use in
> commercial applications except when it is licensed directly from us, but it
> would still be freely available for use in GPL'd applications.
This is 100% perfectly okay. I have done it. Ted Ts'o has done it with
his ext2 resizing code, GhostScript does something similar.
> Unfortunately, I have a sneaking suspicion that there's something wrong with
> my thinking here.
The only things you have to be careful of are:
- making sure everything is kosher before you accept third-party patches
- keeping on top of the GPL version enough that nobody needs to do a version
split.
The difference between this and TrollTech's QT is that because it's
GPL, people are *allowed* to do a version split. But as long as you're
responsive, I don't think there should be much need.
You just need to put a header at the top of the source code file:
/*
* Copyright (c) 1998 Axiom (Cambridge) Ltd.
*
* NOTE: This code may be distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL
* (see below), but Axiom also license it under other commercial terms.
* To avoid a version split, if you have bugfixes for this file, please
* either:
* 1) Assign copyright to Axiom, so we may use it in both places, or
* 2) Place your patches into the public domain, or
* 3) Give Axiom permission to use your changes, or
* 4) Expect us to rewrite your patch.
*
* If you do have to make a change without consulting Axiom, please be
* particularly scrupulous about observing the GPL requirement to note
* what changes you made, so an eventual merge can be managed.
*/
The one thing you ought to do is sit down with your lawyers and figure out
what is the *least threatening* piece of legalese you need to have to
be able to accept third-party patches.
I think people would be unhappy assigning copyright, but you could
probably give some boilerplate placing small patches in the public domain
which could involve a minimum of formality. For example:
/*
* To place your patches in the public domain, just give your name, a
* brief description, and a statement like the following:
*
* June 199 Random Hacker (random@hacker.org):
* Updated for 2.3.43 VFS changes. These changes placed in the
* public domain.
*/
If you keep an RCS/CVS log of all the changes with such comment lines to
document that you have permission to use each one, you should be covered.
But you'll probably want to talk to lawyers about that.
They may require pieces of paper. If you can get one piece of paper
to cover current and future changes, that would be better.
The alternative is that you do *all* the maintenance yourselves. Which
may be manageable, but is enough duplicated effort that having a lawyer
think about what you can accept is probably worthwhile.
(If you need precedents, there may be some in edited books. Editors
"bug-fix" books with small changes, submitted to the author for
approval, much like bg fixes you accept, but if the publishing contract
leaves the author with the copyright, I haven't seen a lot of fussing
over copyright to the edits. But perhaps I'm just ignorant and it's
actually a hot topic.)
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