Protecting the open-source license commons [LWN.net]

Protecting the open-source license commons

Posted Nov 12, 2018 19:00 UTC (Mon) by GoodMirek (guest, #101902)
In reply to: Protecting the open-source license commons by bkuhn
Parent article: Protecting the open-source license commons

As paulj explained in detail, in our jurisdictions we cannot perform sustainable (in terms of covering expenses) GPL enforcement without proprietary relicensing business models.

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Protecting the open-source license commons

Posted Nov 13, 2018 4:47 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

It wasn't clear until now that paulj and yourself were talking about wanting/needing proprietary relicensing business models in order to achieve GPL compliance. I think this should have been stated much more clearly much earlier in the subthread.

Personally, a proprietary relicensing business model achieving GPL compliance sounds like an oxymoron to me.

Could you explain how this might work?

Is the idea to sell enough cheaper proprietary licenses to smaller businesses such that you can afford to take abusively non-compliant large corporations to court? You would then achieve GPL compliance by telling them that due to their license violations (both proprietary and GPL) you won't sell them the proprietary license and then take them to court to get compliance with both the GPL and with the more expensive large-corporation-sized proprietary license? So the end result of such an enforcement action, if successful, would be a number of smaller businesses with non-GPL-compliant codebases (due to proprietary licenses, for the time period specified by those licenses), one large corporation with a GPL-compliant codebase and more money to go after the next abusively non-compliant large corporation.

Protecting the open-source license commons

Posted Nov 13, 2018 5:43 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

No, no.. I have not argued for a proprietary licensing scheme at all! Read https://lwn.net/Articles/770625/ again.

In my personal case, even if *I* did take action against abusers to recover compensation for prior use of my code in the work concerned, outside the copyleft licence I gave, there are (many) other copyright holders, and *in no way* could any abusers I took action against ever receive a "proprietary licence" as a result!

That said, I am not against proprietary licensing at all, if it allows the developers of copyleft software to get the following types of corporates to fund and pay for the development of copyleft software:

a) Corporates who would otherwise avoid using and contributing to copyleft software, as much as possible.

b) Corporates who would otherwise parasitically use and abuse copyleft software

The non-profit model just isn't going to fly. If a non-profit gains traction, it will just be captured by the type-b corporates via donations. I've been in one and watched it happen. It just destroys copyleft software and communities. A few developers benefit perhaps, but the rest is destroyed.