No, it's not the sequel to that wildly popular
television show.
It's not some former Swedish company either. It's
a short but crucial concept: "MY," as opposed, often vociferously, to
"our" and "common."
"MY" is closely associated with another concept: "Proprietary." To be
proprietary, a thing has to have a proprietor. Such a proprietor
might have discovered the thing, created it, or demanded copyright
assignment, but the crucial piece is that there is a single owner.
Licenses, no matter how liberal, can't protect against the
depredations of a greedy, selfish, or simply misguided proprietor.
Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen, bless their mad genius, back in the
1980s, thought way, way ahead. They thought of all the "hoarders"
they could, and figured out ways to thwart them. They planned. They
worked with the dedication of revolutionaries. They gathered
momentum, and created, along with a lot of software, a brilliant
license agreement called the General Public License.
They were the opposition. They were the underdog.
And that's where their vision failed.
They simply could not imagine that some day that they would have won
so thoroughly that the tools of their revolution would be used to
hoard.
It didn't happen right away. Years passed. The GNU tools got popular
and spawned more tools. And more, and more, and more. Eventually
there was even a wildly popular kernel.
But the inevitable happened. Some smart people figured out a way to
turn the GPL into a money machine.
Enter dual licensing, or Feudin' Licenses, as I like to term it.
Feudin' Licenses is the strategy only a proprietor could love. To the
client--note the separation--it's a clear threat. It says, "You can
use MY (there's that word again) tools in certain limited ways, but if
you really want freedom to use them, you need to pay me." It's a
strategy that has been compared, fairly I believe, to that behind Bob
Wallace's
Shareware.
As with shareware, it's not actually about sharing, or "our," or
"common." It's all about MY.
In a later post, I'll go over another word, and until then, keep those
elephants blue!
My understanding is that the GPL is meant to ensure the freedom of the software, not the freedom of the customer who uses it.
And it has nothing to do with being gratis.
But licenses can make it easier to change the proprietor. For instance, UC Berkeley is no longer the proprietor of PostgreSQL in any meaningful way.
I don't think Berkeley behaved as a proprietor to the PostgreSQL project. The closest thing I can think of to proprietary and BSDL is the way the some of the *BSD people behaved through the 1990s. They definitely excluded people who weren't in their "in" group, and this resulted in a lot of people going over to the then-fledgeling Linux, even though it was under a more restrictive license.
I may be wrong, but I have no doubt that someone could "Feudin' License" something with a proprietary and a BSD- or even MIT license. It just isn't currently as popular to do so with those licenses as it is with the GPL.