One thing I don't understand about what McVoy's doing Perens (LinuxWorld) [LWN.net]

One thing I don't understand about what McVoy's doing Perens (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jan 28, 2003 12:57 UTC (Tue) by rknop (guest, #66)
Parent article: Larry McVoy on BitKeeper, kernel development, Linus Torvalds and Bruce Perens (LinuxWorld)

I haven't followed BitKeeper that closely, but an obvious question comes up in my mind.

McVoy claims that he wants to support everybody: free software, also vendors and closed-source software. He also says that he's identified something which the closed-source people want but the free software people don't need: code privacy.

As such, why can't he just release two versions? Release the free software version *without* code privacy under a truly free licence (even the GPL), and sell the version with code privacy under a proprietary licence to the people who want it? Some who misunderstand the GPL would say this is not legal, but it is: if his company owns the copyright, they can release the code under as many different licences as they want. How would his doing this not accomplish what he claims in the article to want to accomplish? Plus, it would silence the flames once and for all.

-Rob

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One thing I don't understand about what McVoy's doing - Perens (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jan 28, 2003 16:00 UTC (Tue) by lm (guest, #6402) [Link]

We tried pretty close to what you are suggesting, we used to release source
under a license which said "you can do pretty much anything you want except
remove the openlogging features". The default target in the Makefile displayed the license.

The first thing people did was to remove the openlogging stuff in direct
violation of the license.

The thing you are missing is that if we release under any source license at
all we make it possible for people to remove the very thing which provides
us with a revenue stream.

One thing I don't understand about what McVoy's doing - Perens (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jan 28, 2003 16:35 UTC (Tue) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

OK, my misunderstanding was that I thought it was something *added* to the commercial version, rather than something present in the FreeBeer version the removal of which made it work for the commercial version.

-Rob

One thing I don't understand about what McVoy's doing Perens (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jan 28, 2003 16:08 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

Probably because a company wanting privacy could take the GPL version and remove the change set advertising code, which would remove the incentive to buy the proprietary version. The code managed by an SCM is not a derived work of the SCM, so the GPL'd version wouldn't place any restrictions on the managed code.