On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 01:09, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> We have customers that don't want to have to make their software GPL
> compatible. They are willing to pay reasonable fees to not only help us
> develop a driver for the overall good of the project but also to have
> certain commercial rights that would not be there if they used the GPL
> version.
Would they be willing to pay you a reasonable amount for an ODBC driver
that was bsd licensed? I can't imagine why they wouldn't since this
would allow them all the commercial rights they need.
> > What do you see as the business (or community) advantage of this?
>
> The business advantage is a $ equation that allows someone like
> Command Prompt to provide continual support for the driver. The ODBC
> driver (at least for us) doesn't have any secondary revenue streams.
> Unlike something like plPHP where we can get residual
> coding dollars from being the definitive experts in plPHP.
>
> The ODBC driver is just that, a driver. If it works it doesn't need
> support except for continued development and bugfixing
And that is your residual income. Every new version of PostgreSQL is
going to require *some* hacking around the code, and there are bound to
be some people who would rather pay you (the experts who wrote the code)
to do this rather than do it on their own.
.
> The community is going to receive a top notch driver, with commercial
> support behind it that allows the community as a whole to continue to grow.
>
But you don't have to do these via a dual license scheme. A single
license scheme where you decide to only fix bugs that you are paid to
fix has the potential to work. You don't have to spend time on
maintaining it if you can't make money on it, other people can feel
comfortable contributing to the code base, and you can still sell
enhanced commercial versions if you want.
Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL