Fwd: mysql

[Armijn Hemel]

On Sat, 2009-05-30 at 00:33 +0200, paolo del bene wrote:
> 
> i never insulted you, now i send copy of the e-mail to policeman,
> Richard
> Matthew Stallman, to Minister of Communications, i wait in an hurry
> your
> apologies.

Alright, quit it you guys, because there is no need for this.

As was said before, dual licensingis by the *copyright holder* is legal.
This is what MySQL does, this is what Nokia does (Qt 4.5 is actually
triple licensed), and so on. Mr. Stallman will not deny this. He might
think it is unethical to release it under any other license than GPL or
LGPL, but that is a whole other debate, for which there are other lists.

The fundamental basis for the validity of the GPL license is copyright.
Free Software does not contradict with copyright, on the contrary. As
with everything that falls under copyright: the copyright holder can
decide what to do with it. He might decide to distribute it to some
people under GPL, to some people under BSD, Artistic, or Beerware
license and sell it to others as proprietary software. Legally there is
nothing wrong with that.

There are a few texts you might want to read first and that might help
clarify your questions. I would recommend this book to start with:

http://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm

armijn

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