[Discuss] Profiting from GPL software

[ingegnue at riseup.net (IngeGNUe)]

On 01/27/16 09:42, Matthew Gillen wrote:
> On 01/26/2016 07:31 PM, IngeGNUe wrote:
>> I'm not good with legalese, but does the GPL allow for that? For
>> releasing the source code only after payment?
> 
> Yes, because the requirement to release source code only comes into play
> when you /distribute/ the software.
> 
> The trouble you can run into is that nothing stops your first customer
> from then turning around and giving it away for free (other than maybe
> their own self-interest if your software gives them an advantage over
> their competitors).
> 
> This is why most companies that successfully do business around the GPL
> (e.g. Redhat) sell services, and don't try to make money directly from
> selling software. It's just too unreliable to depend on every customer
> to not turn around and give it away.
> 
> An interesting exception to this was various instances of
> dual-licensing.  Two that I had either first or second-hand experience
> with were QT and MySQL-AB.
> 
> Long ago, before Oracle bought MySQL-AB, they had a rather obnoxious
> business model (they were perfectly within their rights, the way they
> went about it was underhanded though).  They gave away the
> mysql-connector under the GPL.  Then later, after you had a product,
> their lawyers would stop by and inform you that because you used the
> connector, the GPL will infect your product.  Unless you want to buy a
> license for the non-GPL version of the connector.   What made it perhaps
> seem underhanded is that they all of a sudden realized this was a
> possibility and sent lawyers first thing.  Just had the feel of
> extortion.  Which is bad for your company, esp. when your product is
> trivially replaced in many cases by other free(er) alternatives.
> 
> TrollTech (owners of Qt before Nokia bought it) had a similar
> dual-license model for Qt: use the free GPL version, or they would
> license you a version for use in commercial software.  TrollTech was
> very up-front about it, and made a concerted effort to educate people
> about the distinction between those two versions /before/ you were
> committed.   So they had a bigger hammer which they could have tried to
> beat people with (their product was absolutely unique compared to the
> well-trodden relational-database space; there still to this day is not a
> cross-platform C++ GUI framework that is so elegant), and yet they
> resisted the urge to adopt the extortion-like business model.
> 
> These days, I don't think many people would fall into the MySQL-AB trap,
> because everyone (at least in the circles I run in) pays pretty close
> attention to the licenses of third-party software.  It took getting
> burned by not paying attention to some details of what some of your
> lower level programmers were doing, but I'm actually happy to see
> lessons got learned.  The more voluntary compliance there is, the less
> lawyers have to be involved, and then everyone stays productive.
> 
> The interesting corollary to this though is that when dual-licensing,
> you're potentially giving up the community contributions.  Not many
> developers will be willing to sign over their work so other people can
> sell it (which is what TrollTech and MySQL-AB had to do so they could
> legally do the commercial license).   This was probably less of an issue
> for MySQL-AB, since the only point of contention was the connector,
> which is a relatively small piece of software; the main database being
> GPL didn't cause any problems.  Qt was much bigger code-wise, and had
> major open source projects built on it (e.g. KDE), so there was a
> constant tension.  Amazingly they made it work, although admittedly I
> was not in the trenches of KDE development to know the nitty gritty.
> 
> Matt
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Thank you, that is very informative!