Kuhn: Canonical, Ltd. Finally On Record: Seeking Open Core [LWN.net]

Kuhn: Canonical, Ltd. Finally On Record: Seeking Open Core

Posted Oct 18, 2010 22:15 UTC (Mon) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183)
Parent article: Kuhn: Canonical, Ltd. Finally On Record: Seeking Open Core

I don't quite get what this is all about. I thought that dual licencing (or open core for that matter) was only useful if you have an important code base to which you exclusively own the copyrights (or have them assigned). And in that situation there is a certain quid pro quo for the copyright assignment in that the owner of the code base makes it available under a FLOSS licence in the first place. What code base does Canonical own though that is of such interest to the rest of the world?

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Kuhn: Canonical, Ltd. Finally On Record: Seeking Open Core

Posted Oct 18, 2010 22:27 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Here's a non-exhaustive list of projects that Canonical feels copyright assignment is necessary for:

http://www.canonical.com/contributors

Add to that much of the utouch stack (gies, grail, ginn, grope, etc...) and the new font.

-jef

Kuhn: Canonical, Ltd. Finally On Record: Seeking Open Core

Posted Oct 19, 2010 8:32 UTC (Tue) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

> Here's a non-exhaustive list of projects that Canonical feels copyright assignment is necessary for:
>
> http://www.canonical.com/contributors
>
> Add to that much of the utouch stack (gies, grail, ginn, grope, etc...) and the new font.

Most of those don't look very interesting for dual licencing (which I think is mainly good for software libraries that might be useful for non-free software - Qt being a prime example), with a possible big exception for the utouch stack. I can see though that some might be good for open core (e.g. plugins to use Bazaar in combination with some proprietary systems that don't interest FLOSS developers enough for them to produce free alternatives, or integrating some of the infrastructure tools into semi-proprietary phone OSes).

Personally I wish Canonical success in pulling that off and still keep the juicy bits FLOSS.