Am Freitag, den 07.03.2008, 02:08 +0100 schrieb Ben Franksen:
> Just imagine
> Sun or IBM in a few years trying to demand money for OpenOffice or Linux,
> or whatever. It just doesn't work, people would simply copy the stuff, fork
> the projects, whatever, and no law could forbid this.
Rrrrright. It is technically similar to dumping, but it also lowers the
market entry barrier to almost zero, so we have a monopolist but he
won't be able to reap monopoly benefits.
> The big player cannot
> unilaterally change the license, at least not if they received and accepted
> contributions from outside the sponsored (and, presumably, tightly
> controlled and contract-bound) core developer team.
Actually he can for future releases of the software, but not for the
software that was already released. (Unless it's a license that has a
revocation clause, but I don't think people would accept that as a FOSS
license.)
On a tangent, something like the situation you describe above actually
has happened. There was (and still is) a PHP CMS named Mambo, created by
some Australian company. It was open source, and they were happily
accepting outside contributions. (I think they managed to set up a
license that they would own all contributions but were bound to
re-release them under their free license.)
At one point, they announced they'd change the license to something that
would give them a little more control over the software. I don't recall
details but the change didn't seem to be too drastic to me; still, it
raised suspicion among developers, and after a few months of quarrelling
with the company, they decided to fork and set up their own project.
Interestingly, Mambo has almost fallen out of public recognition, while
Joomla is now widely used :-)
Regards,
Jo