Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

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No, dual licensing simply means something different from what you think it does. Doing your IF statement violates the terms of the MIT license (assuming the same public codebase.).

A dual license is not IF/THEN/ELSE, it's pick $mit or $commercial--your call. If I pick $mit, no obligation to pay. You can not use $mit at all. But if you use it whether as part of a dual license model or otherwise, you don't get to rewrite it. Of course, you don't need to be open source at all which is what I usually tell clients who want their software to be "open source" for marketing purposes but get around some of the business model challenges.

Here's the fairly canonical MySQL example of a dual license: "Oracle uses a dual licensing model for MySQL to meet the needs of its consumers. Oracle offers MySQL under a proprietary (OEM style) license for licensees who want to create and commercially distribute proprietary derivative works incorporating MySQL without revealing the underlying source code and do not wish to be subject to other restrictions and obligations of the GPL. Additionally, Oracle licenses MySQL under the GPL for licensees who simply want to use the software or who want to incorporate MySQL into a product to be later distributed likewise under the GPL."

(Note that Oracle owns the MySQL copyrights. They perhaps couldn't otherwise do this unless subject to some restrictions. You can also just use MySQL without contacting Oracle.)

But what you're proposing, the software doesn't have an MIT license. It has MIT license verbiage coupled to other license language that forbids free commercial use. It's not a dual license. It's a new, different, and non-open source license. (Which is fine but your software isn't then open source.)

So from the IF/THEN/ELSE perspective your variety of dual licensing is not possible in the sense of a rider on an approved open source software license.

(Of course, that assuming you can even define much less enforce "commercial." Creative Commons basically gave up.)

> A dual license is not IF/THEN/ELSE, it's pick $mit or $commercial--your call.

No, it can be both. As the originator of the work, you are free to grant licenses based on qualifications. It's done all the time. I can't choose Adobe's student licence because I'm not a student.

So is this what's held back dual licensing and OS authors profiting? If the buyer could just freely choose of course it's broken.

(edit)

Just to add, even Oracle's license isn't completely free for the user to choose. Depending on the plans or policies of the buyer, they are restricted to their choices. So an IF statement exists.

If you release something under an open source license, of course I get to choose to use it under the terms of that license. That's the whole point.

If that's not acceptable, don't release it under an open source license. Like Adobe's proprietary software, you can release it as free for educational or non-profit use only under your own license. Can be hard to define and hard to enforce but that's your problem.

Do open source or don't do open source. I don't care. But it's tiresome to have people who want the "open source brand" but don't actually want to release open source software. Most of the actual advantages of open source don't accrue to tightly controlled products anyway.

And, yes, I don't consider it a problem but dual licensing, at least outside of open core (which has its own problems), is fairly useless in the general case. So in that sense it's broken. But that is open source working as intended.

> of course I get to choose

No, you are wrong here. Maybe it's semantics or whatever but a rights owner can impose restrictions based on conditions.

>Maybe it's semantics or whatever but a rights owner can impose restrictions based on conditions

Yes. But what we seem to be going in circles on is that IF the rights holder wants to release the software under an OSI-approved license, they don't get to change that license, which is what you're doing if you want to say the software is only available under that license to some subset of users. Of course, they have the right simply not to use an OSI-approved license at all. But OSI-approved licenses all say you CAN'T impose certain restrictions if you're going to use them.

What they CAN do is to dual license the software under an all rights reserved license and their own "source available" license (for eligible users). So long as an OSI-approved license isn't involved, they can do anything they're legally permitted to. If you want usage restrictions, just don't use an OSI-approved license. It's pretty simple and the result is effectively the same.

They can even just cut and paste the MIT license and add a usage restriction clause. They just can't call it--and it isn't--the MIT license anymore.

This is in response to your latest response. Not sure why the reply link isn't showing.

Take adobe student discount. They license at a discount if you're a student.

The rights holder can restrict who gets what license. If you're trying to be able to say "released under OSI approved rubber stamped" then sure, maybe duel licensing is not ok. But you don't need the two licenses to be in agreement, and if you're not a student you don't legally get the student discount just by identifying as one.

So you could easily and legally do, free for not-for-profit, $50 otherwise with source.

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