Re: Licensing

That's an excellent commentary on the issues.

I'll poke at the "business friendly" bit a little bit because it seems
to me that things are a _little_ more complex than that.

The approach MySQL AB has taken with its "dual licensing" (I love to
call it "dueling licensing" ;-)) is, in fact, quite "business
friendly." It's just that the only business that it happens to be
particularly friendly to is MySQL AB. Ditto for TrollTech and Qt, and
Sun and OpenOffice.org.

The "GPL + Traditional License" approach that MySQL AB is encouraging
is compatible with the notion that the "market" will consist of a
single software producer with exclusive ownership of the code base who
then sell it into a traditional style "proprietary" community of
customers/consumers.

Unfortunately, in order to be able to operate under the dual licenses,
this presents the necessity that one party has exclusive ownership of
the application code. That requirement of ownership prevents the kind
of "community participation" we see with PostgreSQL, where there are
numerous contributors working for numerous organizations.

People are often willing to sign over copyright to an organization
that operates in some form of "public interest," wherein you can see
MANY contributions that have gone to GPL-licensed software where
copyright is held by the non-profit "Free Software Foundation."

There has been, in contrast, a distinct paucity of willingness to
donate code to "dueling licenses" organizations. Unlike the FSF
projects, you _don't_ see a lot of code coming in from outside.
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