[OSCOM] Dual licensing & contribs

On 22.06.2006, at 10:41, Florian Gnägi wrote:

> Hi Boris
>
> I was wondering how you deal with code contributions from the
> community when you have two different licenses. Does the Visible
> Source License as you called it only apply to addons or to the whole
> enterprise package?

At the moment, the EE is the CE plus additional modules/jars, so its  
easy to distribute the additional modules with their own license.  
Since all stuff is pluggable in Magnolia, the additional modules can  
just replace classes of the CE. Under the LGPL thats fine ;-)

> Do you ask permission from every code
> contributers to distribute their code snipplets under your commercial
> license?

We ask you to sign a contributors license, just like Apache does - in  
fact, we have copied their agreement. This makes sure that we have  
the right to do whatever we want with their contributions, so we may  
use them for our commercial software as well.


> I mean this as a serious question. I was developing an open source
> learning management system (sometimes also calles learning content
> management system) at university of zuerich and we choose an apache
> style license. Now I'm building up a spinn-off company and we are
> providing commercial services for the e-learning system. We thought
> of creating a commercial version to make money, however in the end we
> found it to complicated to deal with all the community contributions
> we had to integrate in a legal way in to a version that we would
> license under a commercial license.

I can understand you. All the things we have gone through in the past  
three years would make up a good book or two. Nearly anything about  
open source is different than what the general public assumes about it.


> I'd appreciate some information about how your company deals with
> this issue very much!


HTH
Boris