Re: [webmin-l] Virtualmin Professional license

[Joe C. <jo...@sw...>]

Hi Barry and all,

Sorry for jumping in a bit late in this licensing three.  A guy's gotta 
sleep sometime.

But, I can bring the license discussion to a satisfying conclusion for 
everyone with this one post.  There is nothing to debate, as the legal 
issues are all very clear.

The free version of Virtualmin (now called Virtualmin GPL to avoid 
confusion with Virtualmin Professional) is licensed under the GPL.

The commercial version is copyrighted software and is not covered by the 
GPL.  Jamie Cameron (and now Virtualmin, Inc., of which Jamie is a 50% 
shareholder) holds the entire copyright to the Virtualmin codebase, and 
thus it can be licensed in any way he (or the company) choose to license 
it, including a non-Open Source license.

This does not conflict with the GPL, though it seems to be a common 
misconception that it does.  The GPL is a license.  A license dictates 
what folks who do not hold the copyright can do with code.  It does not 
have any bearing on what the holder of the copyright can do with the 
code.  We hold the copyright, and thus we are releasing a dual-licensed 
product, as Craig pointed out TrollTech, MySQL AB, and many others do in 
order to provide a commercial product along-side a non-commercial GPL 
product.  We are not breaking new ground here, and there is no legal 
debate about whether a person who holds the copyright can license it in 
any way they like.  This is a time-tested business model for 
predominantly Open Source companies.  It is not the only one, but it is 
one that works and is well within the rights of copyright holders.

There is no "legal mess" that we can get into, as we are the copyright 
holders.  The GPL doesn't create an obligation in us to continue to 
provide all of our future work for free, nor does it obligate us to 
continue to license our work in the same way we have in the past.  We 
are not altering the license of the already GPL version of Virtualmin, 
and we have no desire to do so.  We are both Open Source fanatics and 
have been for far longer than it has been trendy to be so, and we will 
continue to work on Open Source projects (including Webmin, Usermin, and 
Virtualmin GPL).

I hope this clears things up for anyone who might have questions about 
the license.

I certainly encourage you to query legal council, if you reckon we (and 
MySQL AB and TrollTech and AMD and Perl Foundation and dozens or 
hundreds of other entities who offer products under the GPL and some 
other license, whether proprietary or otherwise) are all wrong about how 
we can license our own software.  But I assure you there is no debate in 
the GNU community about dual-licensed code being permissible.  In fact, 
there have been a number of official GNU projects (i.e. Ghostscript) 
that were dual-licensed.

Nothing to debate here.  Really.

Regards,
Joe