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Comment by hastly | Hacker News Reader

Making everything virally GPL doesn't solve the problem of nobody paying for open source development.

I actually think if everything out there was GPL'd, it would make it even more difficult to build businesses and make money from open source software, because you couldn't use open source in a proprietary project if you so chose.

I think instead we need a set of incentives in which it's a terrible idea to use software, open source or not, without sharing a fair slice of the value you're getting with the author(s). How to actually implement this is left as an exercise for the reader.

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> it would make it even more difficult to build businesses and make money from open source software

Yes, isn't that kind of the point?

Not in the slightest. If people are able to get paid for what they do, they're able to invest quite a bit more time and attention to doing it. Ideally, people could get paid for their development of software based on how useful others find it, without the collapse of value that comes from artificially making it scarce. There's nothing that guarantees that's a reachable ideal, though...

> think if everything out there was GPL'd, it would make it even more difficult ... because you couldn't use open source in a proprietary project.

If everything was GPL'ed, there would not be any proprietary projects. Everything would be GPL'ed.

What about dual licensing? People who don't pay get GPL, while those who pay get BSD/MIT?

Then one person pays, gets BSD/MIT code, and shares it freely.

So, if you set the cost of BSD/MIT code for each release enough for one sale to fund the whole cost of the release, it might work.

They have to maintain it too if they want other people to use it. Red Hat and CentOS comes to mind. Nobody can run OSS RHEL without doing the same work the CentOS people are doing.

> They have to maintain it too if they want other people to use it.

Sure, but BSD/MIT projects can sell premium proprietary derivatives and services to fund both the open source and proprietary parts of the project -- heck, a company planning to do the proprietary aspects could buy the BSD/MIT license to the project and contribute that to a community project, and then contribute some staff development time to the open parts of the project while also building a proprietary derivative (see, e.g., EnterpriseDB and PostgreSQL.) And, the people that are likely to do that are the most likely to spend money to get a BSD/MIT license for something with a free GPL license, since they would actually have a financial interest which would justify the cost.

I'm not sure it makes sense to have your second non-GPL license be BSD/MIT; wouldn't it be better to make it some proprietary license, licensing it specifically to the customer who pays for it?

But anyway; in my limited anecdotal experience, I don't know that all companies would bother sharing the BSD/MIT code anyway. They tend to be occupied doing their own work, not redistributing whatever open source software components they got from somewhere else.

Some companies might; but the point is that, I think that, no, they would not necessarily pay for it and then share it with everyone else.

Traditionally, dual licensing works with GPL plus a "regular old commercial" license to integrate the library (it's usually a library) into the proprietary code.

It's a viable model for some things, like libraries; not so much for others.

Funding open source is a tricky problem. It is, in some ways, a 'public good' in the economics sense:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

If you make a dual license GPL/commercial product, how will any other people contribute? Wouldn't they have to agree that their contribution has GPL + whatever commercial licence the project maintainer sells to some company later?

Exactly, they have to assign copyright to you/your company.

No, they just need to give you a sub-licensable license. It might sound like the same, but it means they can still use their own work as they wish (and give out other licenses), unlike copyright assignment.

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