Dual-Licensing Situation

[Jacob Head]

AR wrote:
 > 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.

I think you are making a mistake in assuming that because the reason you 
have been given relates to you accepting the GPL, that that condition 
must be written into the GPL.

The company is allowed to deny a propriety licence to whoever they want. 
There is no obligation to sell a product to whoever asks. They don’t 
need to give you a reason. The reason you have been given relates to 
already taking a licence for one of their products. However, it could 
just as well be a product which has nothing to do you with them. For 
example, if they say “you cannot buy a propriety licence as you have a 
licence for GTK” and what you are saying is correct, the GTK’s GPL is 
wrong as it lacks the term saying “you cannot buy a propriety licence 
for QT”.  This cannot be the case.

Equally, these “terms” do not, to me, seem to be terms. A licence term 
is a binding obligation on a party. These do not seem to exist here. You 
are being allowed to apply for a licence and they were exercising their 
rights as copyright holders to deny one. It would be a very different 
story if you were being told “you have broken the GPL because you have 
applied for a propriety licence” or if the company were to say “we 
cannot give you a propriety licence because doing so breaks the GPL”. In 
those cases, additional terms would have been written into the GPL, but 
not in this case.

What, I think, you are actually looking for is a warning, not a licence 
term. Of course, it would make sense for such a thing to be provided, 
but there is no obligation.

-Jacob