Re: Kawa (re-)licensing

[Jim White <jim at pagesmiths dot com>]

Chris Dean wrote:

> Bruce Lewis <brlewis@ALUM.MIT.EDU> writes:
>
> > I'm not sure I understand this.  Could you give a fictitious example of a
> > company that would want to negotiate a commercial license because of the
> > current license, but wouldn't want to negotiate a commercial license if
> > it were LGPLed?
>
> If the company wanted to make changes to Kawa, then in the current
> license that new code would be under GPL.  If the company didn't want
> to use a GPL license they could negotiate with Per for a private
> license.
>
> If Kawa were under the LGPL, then the company could (under one
> interpretation) just publish its changes to Kawa and not pay Per for a
> private license.

The real question is whether there are companies that buy commercial 
licenses to keep their modifications to Kawa secret.  I think that is 
rather rare.  It is the case that there are companies that don't want to 
be burdened with having to keep track of whether they are complying with 
(L)GPL and so like to simply buy source licenses.

I see no reason to encourage such laziness.  Complying with LGPL is 
(nearly) trivial.  If they wanna pay money to Per to ensure their 
changes are duly published (in a seperate branch if necessary in the 
worst case) that is their option.

I suspect that most of Per's customers have actually contracted for 
customization work and not just a commercial license for Kawa.  In this 
case LGPL is also not a problem since the work just gets segregated into 
Kawa changes and proprietary stuff that belongs to the company.  That is 
a very common business model for OSS developers.

Jim White