Dual-Licensing Situation

[AR]

maillistaddress at paulbanks.org wrote:
> I've been following some of the commentary on this for a while now but I've not seen mention of the entity who is offering software on these terms. It sounds to me a bit like the blurb surrounding Trolltechs QT licence where you have to pick at the outset whether it's a commercial project or not. (Although I was unable to locate the actual text of the commercial license.)
>   

Paulbanks gets the prize.  :-)  As I said before, I didn't mention the 
name of the licensor to avoid smearing, and I believe there is enough 
good discussion here that has avoided that.

If you install Ubuntu 7.10, you get installations of qt3 and qt4.  For 
both of those, there is this file:

/usr/share/doc/libqt4-gui/copyright
or
/usr/share/doc/libqt3-headers/copyright

Both of these refer to /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL or 
/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 which are identical files.

Nowhere within the distribution is there any mention, that I can find, 
that by agreeing to this license I can no longer obtain a proprietary 
license.  But paulbanks quotes their website below.

> They write, "Trolltech's commercial license terms do not allow you to start developing proprietary software using the Open Source edition."
>
> In this case, it does indeed appear to prevent you from doing what you want to do: i.e. start a commercial project based on code developed with an open source edition. But as far as I can tell, whilst that's perhaps against the spirit of free software* and of questionable morality, it's not a violation of any license. They're free to license their own stuff (or not) on whatever terms they want to.
>   

I agree that they can license their stuff on whatever terms they want 
to.  My complaint is that they must tell licensees up-front what they 
are agreeing to, and they are not doing that, and that there must be 
some kind of license violation as a result.

> C'est la vie.
>
> Paul
>
> * I'm of two minds on this though. On the one hand, the perception is that they are 'holding to ransom' the right of the copyright holder of the derived work to make money from their work. On the other hand, it's the same as if they chose not to create a commercial licence at all... which is definitely in the spirit of free software. However, they DO offer a commercial license and I have to admit this kind of restriction leaves a somewhat sour taste in the mouth and makes me much more likely to choose another vendor. In QT's case, theres plenty of other mature high-quality toolkits out there.
>   

I'm glad you're seeing my point, but it is more than a sour taste in the 
mouth.  It appears I am barred from obtaining the proprietary license 
and dual-licensing my code to someone who wants to buy it and pay me 
royalties for it solely because I accepted the GPLv2, without any 
mention in the terms of the license that that is the case.