Recently I had the need considering the license for a Java open source project administered by myself, JGAP. JGAP is a Genetic Algorithms Package that helps solving problems in a Darwinian way.
To Open-Source or not?
Well, the thing about open source software is, that it is available to anyone accepting the license agreement. And that agreement is the point. Some people may not want to make their work public by giving their source code away just because a stupid piece of code used forces one to do that. In contrast, it should not be allowed to go for gold with open source software just according to the weather today. Meaning, some forces are wanted and should not be omittable by any reason.
But after getting that with the LGPL you either have to submit your source code to public or need to make your software reverse-engineerable it should be clear that no commercial product will want to use LGP'd pieces of code.
Dual licensing
Fortunately, sometimes a serious person asked me to use JGAP for his commercial software package. That was motivation enough thinking about licensing models. I came up with dual-licensing offering one license for open source projects and another one for commercially oriented software.
I chose LGPL for the open source side. There are several other fitting licenses for that case, no problem should arise here.
For the commercial usage of JGAP I decided to use the MPL as I was pointed to a Java project doing this as well. Therefor it should work, I thought and informed myself about MPL and it seemed promising to me.
Now JGAP is set up with LGPL as well as MPL. You can chose LGPL without any restrictions. The MPL can onle be chosen after donating a certain amount to the paypal account of the JGAP project. This seems a fair solution to me. What do you think?
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