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Michael Meeks points out one of the poorly recognised aspects of dual-license scenarios (including those where patents are licensed). The contract companies submit to in order to gain non-open-source access to the software may well (in my experience usually does) include clauses restricting the exercise of freedoms available under the open source license. That can mean losing the freedom to contribute to competing projects or the freedom to use the software in other contexts under the open source license rather than under the private agreement.
One of the unseen menaces to software freedom is bilateral (private) agreements that supersede apparent freedoms. That’s a great reason to oppose RAND as a way of licensing patents in standards by the way – RAND ensures the market is not transparent and open because it compels participants to engage in bilateral agreements that supersede software freedom.
- Red Hat tries the value argument for open source
This is the sort of thing that makes me want to believe in synchronicity. My keynote in Bolzano at SFSCON just before Savio posted this story was about some of the benefits of open source that would be worth paying extra for.
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Good to see a solution being found. It’s by no means a perfect answer; I see that initially the support will be SoyLatte-style. It will clearly take some time to get the OpenJDK version to the level users expect. But at least the public campaigns had some effect.
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