Serge van Ginderachter Closing source licenses are the evil ones
Serge van Ginderachter made me think a bit more about quick link to Bait and Switch from yesterday He says :
It's al whole different matter when dual licensing comes with different products. You get one edition in open source, and need to buy a closing source license for another edition with more goodies. In this case you really have pieces of code that mandatorily remain closed source. That is not a good thing.
And indeed I have to elaborate :)
It's not the dual licensing as such which is the problem it's the wannabe open source companies that use their minimal open source product as a marketing feature to campaign their more featured commercial product with a similar name but with a totally different featureset. In these cases we are not talking about the same codebase at all. But to the untrained eye it might look as a dual licensed version of a the project.
Or even worse, companies that mention an opensource product in their brochures but when you take a closer look aren't even involved in that project at all . Or the ones that claim we are building such and such, it's going to be open source but for now it's still closed. Every market has its pioneers , it's honest people , and the ones that try to benefit from something by claiming they are part of it while in reality they are just in there for the money.
Just lets make clear that I`m not talking about the Xensource, MySQL, Suse, Qlusters, RedHat , Alfresco and Outerthoughts of this planet :)