About software licenses
Community Forums/General Help/About software licenses
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| If I decide to make a new Open Source project, let's say, using the LGPL license (or the like), can I reserve the right to later-on create a closed source branch for a comercial project? (while keeping the original one open). Also, can I limit the open source license to open-source and freeware project only, and keep a comercial paid license for comercial use for ANY of the branches? Does anybody know wich otions do I have or where to ask? Thanks! |
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| You don't lose any rights to the code personally when you release it under the LGPL. You can still do whatever you want with it. Think about MySQL's dual license. The trouble is in accepting contributions - you can do what you want with your own code, but you will need to get any contributors to sign over complete rights over their code to you, otherwise you'll be violating their license to you if you use their code in a closed source product. |
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| You can dual-licence (or triple, or more) whatever you like, so it's easy to have a commercial licence cover multiple products that are also open source. I wouldn't use LGPL though, because even though many people see it as a non-commercial licence (I have called it this myself before), technically it doesn't actually prevent commercial use. If you specifically wanted to do that, rather than just ensure the changes are shared, you'd really do better to find something else. |
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| If you want to add a "only free for non-commercial use" clause, then I don't think you can use GPL/LGPL as a license, but have to use a derivative license instead. And like Michael mentioned above, it's important to keep your dual licensing in mind when accepting 3rd party improvements / bugfixes. Either by having them explicitly sign over the copyright to you personally so you are able to assign a different license to it down the road, or (much easier) only accept contributions that are declared public domain. PD code is free for anyone to take, so it's no problem if you include it under a more restrictively licensed program. (Of course others would be free to 'borrow' those portions of the program as well, but the overall project and complete program would still be covered under whatever license(s) you picked yourself) |
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| Nevermind, I was thinking on a licensing schema for this: http://www.blitzmax.com/logs/userlog.php?user=6809&log=1758 but I think that's what BlitzMax2 (or whatever it is called) will be more or less the same I had in mind (but officially endorsed and developed by Mr. sibly), so no reason to develop my draft further. |
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