Comment Re:Well (Score 1) 374
Man, realize what you're asking. You're asking *anyone* who just wants to get together with some folks and hack out code in their spare time to basically form a business partnership with all their contributors. Then, they won't be able to take patches from random contributors (because they'd have to get a dual-licensed patch and form a financial relationship with the contributor), or link to any other GPL software (because of same)... at that point they might as well forget the GPL entirely.
Or maybe you think the licensor should do the legwork -- you'd rather try to track down the >1000 contributors to the Linux kernel and cut each one of them a cheque yourself next time you want a closed-source Linux license? Good luck!
Plus, you must be pretty naive to think that money won't ruin relationships between developers. How many partnerships have you been in? People really are assholes. Why poison something fun you do in your spare time with the stress of having to disburse licensing fees, including tax paperwork and documentation to convince your co-contributors that you're not shafting them?
Still, if we as a society decide we want to have compulsory software licenses, I'm sure there's a way we can make it work. We could form an administrative body to handle fees, and make it an offense to distribute binaries without registering the source -- and make it go both ways, make commercial developers offer source licenses to anything they distribute, too. There'd have to be a stock, say, per-non-comment-line rate... of course, I'm in Canada and you're probably not, so there'd have to be an international treaty...
(Incidentally, Stallman would love the idea of compulsory source licensing. That's EXACTLY why he created the GPL -- if we had compulsory source licensing for commercial software, it would be entirely obsolete.)