Re: draft of a new Open Source Commercial License

[Robert Slover]

On Sep 18, 2013, at 4:58, Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com> wrote:

> [2] Companies often have terms in place permitting certain licences;
> if yours is not one of them, it will not be considered, no matter how
> good the product may be.

This is a critical point. Even getting our corporate lawyers to OK our use of 
the Perl interpreter (not even a custom one, mind you) required negotiating 
with them until they understood the license, since it wasn't on their short 
list of pre-digested licenses. Being able to point to  the distributions 
bundled with Solaris and Oracle Enterprise was helpful in convincing them that 
this license was acceptable to the mainstream. Other, lesser-known licenses 
would have stood no chance. 

I always sort of liked the Alladin license - proprietary if you wanted the 
current release, while older releases got GPL'd. Submitted patches incorporated 
into the (proprietary) current release, so that they took a while to trickle 
down to the GPL'd version, providing incentive to pay for it. I do not know how 
successful that was in general, but I paid the price a couple of times (through 
a former employer) to get necessary new features. Overall, it seemed a fair way 
to fund things. 

--Robert