plugin licensing was( Re: [wp-hackers] Plugin author stats )

[David Chait]

From: "Lloyd D Budd" <lloydomattic at gmail.com>
> On 10/24/06, David Chait <davebytes at comcast.net> wrote:
>> More importantly, what about dual licensing?  I know of TONS of OSS 
>> projects
>> where there's a commercial-use license separate from the personal-use
>> GPL/et.al. license.  Heck, isn't that how id licensed the Quake sources?
>
> I don't think your description reflects the licensing, or by
> definition of OSS the projects you describe are not OSS. For example
> mysql "commercial" licensing is for if GPL does not meet my (a user of
> mysql) distribution needs (basically).

Yes, that applies for most of the cases.  So someone wanting to publish a 
commercial product off of Q3 buys the closed-source commercial license. 
i.e., the original code owner can release the code in multiple manners. 
Though, there's also the case where a company will release a 'lite' version 
of their program/code as OSS, and have a 'pro' version that is 
closed-source.

But thanks for making that more clearly stated, as my original statement had 
it twisted around the wrong way. ;)

>> I'm on the verge of either dropping support of many of my plugins or 
>> needing
>> to do commercial licenses for people with money-making (i.e., commercial)
>> websites.  I'm glad WP is GPL, I'm fine with the fact that Matt has a
>> company making money off this project (and offshoots, not all of which 
>> are
>> open source...), but GPL doesn't work for me.  A dual-license scheme 
>> would
>> potentially work, though admittedly I've never really looked into it.
>
> Depending on how your plugin interacts with WP core, all its licenses
> would have to be GPL compatible, if you wish to distribute it.

...and depending on your reading of the GPL.  As there's been numerous 
threads on that topic, I don't want to kick off another.. ;)