Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2000 18:07:51 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in>, Arun Sharma <adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: On "intelligent people" and "dangers to BSD" Message-ID: <4.2.2.20000318180428.03e80530@localhost> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0003190415120.14850-100000@theory7.physics.i isc.ernet.in> References: <20000318133103.A18560@sharmas.dhs.org>
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At 03:59 PM 3/18/2000 , Rahul Siddharthan wrote: >More recently, Hans Reiser makes it clear that he plans to >dual-license ReiserFS in some way, GPL for linux and commercial >licence for commercial vendors who may be interested, I think he >too plans to control the copyrights to all contributions in some >way. Dual licensing doesn't work. Reiser will be caught in the same trap as Deutsch. Here's why. First, only a very un-savvy businessman would license code for money when there's a GPLed version available. This is true for two reasons. First, the existence of the GPLed version effectively reduces the market value of its functionality to zero; anyone can get that functionality for free! Thus, if one pays money to license GPLed code, one is paying for something which has no market value to end users. This puts the commercial developer "in the hole" from the start. Second, the GPL provides for a few "loopholes" which allow the author's potential licensees to use the code without licensing it. (For example, some vendors of print drivers for UNIX invoke GNU Ghostscript but then post-process the output through their own software after that. They don't change GhostScript itself.) So, in many cases, they have no need to license the GPLed code, and the author loses. So, if he ever wants to make money by licensing the code, he should not try to do dual licensing. It WILL fail. --Brett To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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