iPhone restricts users, GPLv3 frees them

[Charlton Wilbur]

On Jul 3, 2007, at 11:47 AM, Michael Brian Bentley wrote:

> If I were to develop something in the next few months, I would make  
> the source available as a GPL v3 project, so that anyone that wants  
> to use it within the constraints of GPL v3 can; and folks who want  
> to use it commercially can buy a commercial license.

I can't think of a situation in which I'd release any project under  
the GPL.

If I don't intend to profit from the code, it may as well be BSD  
licensed, because I think anyone who can profit by improving my code  
is welcome to, and I prefer coder freedom to code freedom.  Besides,  
the code I wrote is the only code I have any moral authority over; if  
someone else wants to write code and not release it freely, I don't  
think I have any standing to insist that he should do otherwise.

If I do intend to profit from the code, dual-licensing it with the  
GPL turns into a quagmire, because in order to avoid nasty lawsuits I  
have to make sure that the copyright of any patch I apply to the  
project is assigned to me.  (This is the legal position of the FSF,  
and was one of the several underlying causes of the GNU Emacs/Lucid  
Emacs schism.)  Only the copyright holder can choose to dual-license  
a work; if someone contributes a patch, he has the copyright on the  
patch; you have his permission implicitly to release it under the  
GPL, but *not* to dual-license it. Unless there's a large community  
making a lot of valuable contributions to the code, the hassle of  
paperwork and legal ass-covering outweighs the benefits of many eyes.

> I wouldn't want to release source using a permissive free license  
> like BSD because the free stuff mingles with the commercial stuff  
> too readily. Interactions with other GPL code projects become a  
> hairy legal question. And, importantly, then the only way I can  
> legitimately make any money from commercial exploitation of the  
> work is to have these folks contract me to modify code. Keeping the  
> free open source side as separate as possible contractually from  
> the commercial side is a good way to go.

This is true, but I'd question what benefits you get from making the  
project open source in the first place -- once the GPL is involved,  
the legalities get much more complicated.  MySQL and Trolltech  
benefit because developers can experiment and play without  
constraint, and then the developers' employers can buy commercial  
licenses -- the GPL'd version is really just an extended time- 
unlimited demo.  For projects of that level of popularity, that makes  
a lot of sense.

Charlton


-- 
Charlton Wilbur
cwilbur at gmail.com
cwilbur at chromatico.net