Re: "Open Core" and the Ada Community

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* David Botton:

> I no longer see a point in choosing GPL over BSD/MIT licenses. Those
> that have a community ethic will act accordingly and be good citizens
> of open source, the rest use the GPL as a weapon to harm the
> community.

This doesn't work if the community owns the copyright.

The immediate problem often is copyright assignment with asymmetric
licensing terms to some central party.  But I don't think this is what
happens in the cases you are so concerned about because the assignment
is either to the wrong party, or no assignment takes place at all.

The real problem is a lack of a diverse development community, and no
interest on the side of the primary (or original) contributor/project
steward to create a such a community (which is somewhat understandable
because it as a lot of work).  Once there is an actual development
community that brings value to the primary contributor, licensing
matters less because power is shared in other ways.

(With “development community” I mean people collaborating to improve
the software itself, not merely using it.)

In the general case, this is not related to “open core” at all.
People will call your free software “open core” even if it is *always*
GPL (even for paying customers), and all features are available in
public versions downloadable for free.