A dual license system for code libraries?

[Carsten Agger]

On 02/26/2017 05:40 PM, Agner Fog wrote:

> This is the best proposal so far. But it still nags me that this gives 
> proprietary software vendors a free lunch when they are actually quite 
> willing to pay, while the open source movement has so many financing 
> problems. Here are some low-hanging fruits that we are not picking 
> because we cannot agree how to organize it.
>
Business models is an interesting topic. Many companies use some sort of 
proprietary licensing to finance free software development. E.g. 
Collabora, who sell their support packages for LibreOffice with a 
proprietary binary so they can charge per seat. I'm not sure I think 
that practice is very compelling, I think they should rather call the 
support agreement a support agreement and charge per seat or however 
they want, and stuff the redundand concept of a proprietary binary 
consisting only of free software.

Honestly, I think we should focus speculations on business model on 
providing software under free licenses. For that reason, I'm personally 
against the selling of exceptions.

If our business models never involve releasing under a proprietary 
license, we're not contributing to the proprietary software economy, and 
that's that.

Another thing: As a developer, I think the GPL is too restrictive a 
license for libraries. If I write a very small, nearly trivial, 
application based on a given library, I like having the option of 
placing it in the public domain or releasing it under the two-clause BSD 
license or any other free license that's not the GPL. For that reason, I 
believe I'd always place any library I write myself under the LGPL or 
similar.