A small disagreement in FSFLand

Karsten Gerlof, President of FSF Europe, has posted a blog entry that is very much at odds with the opinion I discussed the other day of Richard Stallman and some others, on the question of the value of dual licensing.

A couple of the best paragraphs:

It is MySQL’s dependence on a single company which had led the project into this mess. That dependence is a consquence of MySQL’s dual licensing strategy.

...

The dual-licensing approach, and the reliance on proprietary licenses as a source of revenue, has severely hampered the growth of what could have turned by now into a much bigger ecosystem. The strategy has led to a huge gap between the original developer (MySQL as a company) and second-tier firms providing support and development services. It also forced developers who wanted to contribute to MySQL to sign unequal copyright agreements. Some did, some didn’t. As a consequence, MySQL’s development community is not as strong as it could be.

He's spot on.

And, to reiterate the point I made the other day, what I like about the PostgreSQL approach is that it puts all the players on a level playing field. There is no privileged player.