From: Joe C. <jo...@sw...> - 2005-09-16 15:25:11
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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 |