[Flug] Stallman difende il dual licensing?!?

[leonardo]

Ciao fluggggsssss...
Ho visto l'articolo su PI e mi sono andato a leggere la lettera aperta
inviata da stallman ed altri all'antitrust europeo. In sintesi dicono:
non permettete che Oracle compri Sun (che ha comprato mysql) oppure
oracle affosserà gli sviluppi di MySql. A chi gli risponde che si può
sempre fare un Fork lui dice che mysql non sopravviverebbe senza uno
schema di dual-licensing GPL/proprietario (se fai un fork non puoi fare
dual-licensing). il che mi suona strano detto da lui, è un po' come se
dicesse che il software libero da solo non basta a campare, ma se si
fanno le cose in grande c'e' bisogno anche di licenze proprietarie.

http://keionline.org/ec-mysql

estratto:

Defenders of the Oracle acquisition of its competitor naively say Oracle
cannot harm MySQL, because a free version of the software is available
to anyone under GNU GPL version 2.0, and if Oracle is not a good host
for the GPL version of the code, future development will be taken up by
other businesses and individual programmers, who could freely and easily
"fork" the GPL'd code into a new platform. This defense fails for the
reasons that follow.

MySQL uses the parallel licensing approach to generate revenue to
continue the FLOSS development of the software. If Oracle acquired
MySQL, it would then be the only entity able to release the code other
than under the GPL. Oracle would not be obligated to diligently sell or
reasonably price the MySQL commercial licenses. More importantly, Oracle
is under no obligation to use the revenues from these licenses to
advance MySQL. In making decisions in these matters, Oracle is facing an
obvious conflict of interest – the continued development of a powerful,
feature rich free alternative to its core product.

As only the original rights holder can sell commercial licenses, no new
forked version of the code will have the ability to practice the
parallel licensing approach, and will not easily generate the resources
to support continued development of the MySQL platform.


ciao,
leonardo.
-- 
http://leonardo.lilik.it
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