I agree with you that it should be based on choice rather the be forced. What I am most interested in is providing solid reasons why it is in a companies best interest to contribute.

I would rather offer a carrot, and just skip the stick.

That was never my decision, though I have advocated it.

It is hard to say what the right solution is. I find it sad to see how in some bsd projects few of the vendors who make use of the software participate in improving the base software. On the same token having a monopoly on source changes seems to also stifle innovation.

I believe we have yet to achieve the propper balance that will eventually be required.

Hi!

So I will repeat myself one more time, you are free to do what you want with what you write.

I said nothing about what Oracle or Sun should do. I have pointed out that the dual license model is a viable business model.

What I have said is Richard has squandered an opportunity to address larger questions that exist for free/open source to support a model that is contrary to the promotion of additional open source software.

I see that you are trying to make some point, but I believe you are doing it at the expense of reading what I am writing.

Can I suggest you clearly write out the point you are trying to make? Giving you the benefit of doubt, I assume you have some other point you want to make beyond "the dual source model can make you money".

Hi!

I am not sure where in histrory you will find that I have ever advocated for dual licence, since it is well known that I do not for work which I personally do (aka if you check you will find that I lean toward BSD).

Also, I believe people are free to do whatever they like with what they produce. No company doing original work should feel that they have to open source it.

What I object to is Richard's comments which I find counter to the notion at what is at the center of notion of the gpl. I seem to remember the fsf suggesting once that developers assign copyright to them to block dual license strategies. Richard's current statement seems at odds with this.

You are welcome to do whatever you like with whatever you write Bruce, but I wouldn't suggest that other developers contribute their work to you, just so that you can change the license and make a buck off them.

Oops, wrong comment to post on.

Btw I assume you are referring to the non-sense that gpl follows protocol. Notice that with drizzle we have bsd drivers, and that many others drivers exist that are not gpl. The concept that gpl infects via protocol is absurd.

Hi Bruce!

Please note that I say nothing about the effectiveness of dual licensing as a business model. Pay-day loans exist as a business model, but I do not find that they are healthy for the communities that they exist in.

Richard is choosing to ignore the overall health of community interaction in order to favor a business model that is in direct conflict with "free software". This is what I find to be sad in his actions.

The fact that he is squandering his opportunity to further the cause of free/open source is shameful.

-Brian

Btw I originally replied to the wrong comment from you , hence this post. The iPhone is not the greatest interface to slashdot :)

Perl, php, python, postgres, memcached, and many others have copyrights which are shared among multiple copyright owners. Apache is in the same boat (Rasmus continues to not sign over his rights). Mysql itself, do to Oracle owning Innodb, is in part owned Oracle as well as Sun.

Hi Bruce!

Please note that I say nothing about the effectiveness of dual licensing as a business model. Pay-day loans exist as a business model, but I do not find that they are healthy for the communities that they exist in.

Richard is choosing to ignore the overall health of community interaction in order to favor a business model that is in direct conflict with "free software". This is what I find to be sad in his actions.

The fact that he is squandering his opportunity to further the cause of free/open source is shameful.

-Brian

Hi!

When we forked for Drizzle we rewrote all of the client code so that it could go under the BSD. So for Drizzle clients only need to link against libdrizzle.

In the MySQL world? There are several public domain/LGPL/BSD client libraries out there. If you are stuck on the GPL it is just because you have not looked around.

Cheers,
      -Brian

Hi!

The Developer's who are working on the Drizzle's JDBC drivers are licensing these under the BSD license. I am expecting to see this difference go away over the next year or so (and not only for JDBC, but for all drivers). My personal opinion is that developers shouldn't have to get into license debates every time they go to integrate open source code.

Cheers,
      -Brian

Hi!

We are talking about finding a way to allow him to pull Drizzle code back into his tree. It is not a simple task though... Drizzle has been cleaned up since the fork (warnings removed, moved on to more of a C++ design, use of stdint, etc...), so he has to clean up his own tree as well before this can happen.

Cheers,
      -Brian