Licensing issues with CKeditor and other commercial / open codebases

Question

Does anyone know anything about how a dual open/commecial licensing program works?

For instance with CKeditor.. they seem to have an open dev community.. but also make code available commercially.. does this mean that they are selling the open source community's efforts on the commercial side?

Same thing with SugarCRM..  large open developer community .. but they sell it too..  Don't see how this is compatible with GPL, LGPL, GPL-A etc..  Or maybe they are only really selling the extensions.

thnx much

Answer 1

Open source software means it is free as in freedom, not price. There is nothing in GPL that says you can't sell software.

I could take Q2A and sell it to you if I like. As long as I provide all the code upon request (which you would get anyway since it's a PHP app) then it is perfectly legal.

Similarly, if Gideon was selling Q2A through this site, but under GPL, then I could buy a copy and distribute it to anyone else I like, free of charge.

With dual licensing, you choose the option that matches what you want to do with it. In Q2A's case, since it is open source it uses the GPL license for CKeditor. If Q2A was being sold as closed-source software then Gideon would need to pay a fee to use one of their commercial licenses. Hope that explains a few things!

Comments

Thank you for an awesome helpful post...  I can see where I went wrong..

I thought that if the Open Source owner sold the code.. it would be selling community property ..  but actually ANYONE can sell the code.. so its a level playing field that way..  ( pretzel logic but its starting to make sense  :)