< Day Day Up > |
In business, timing is everything. A few months' lead developing and commercializing a product can mean the difference between commercial success and failure. For some commercial licensees , obtaining access to the source code now rather than eventually may justify paying for those license rights. This business reality has encouraged companies to create licensing strategies that generate revenue from customers willing to pay extra for additional lead time to develop their products. Artifex Software, the distributor of Ghostscript, uses such a scheduled licensing model. Initially new versions of Ghostscript are not fully open source, but at a later time they become open source under the GPL. Ghostscript is intended to be embedded into printers to support industry-standard page description languages like PostScript and PDF. The lead time to introduce enhanced printers is short and the competition among printer vendors is fierce. Some of Artifex Software's customers seek a marketing advantage by getting new versions of Ghostscript early. New versions of Ghostscript are distributed initially under the Aladdin Free Public License. They are also distributed under Artifex Software's commercial licenses. Despite its confusing name , the Aladdin Free Public License is not an open source license. It prohibits commercial distribution of Ghostscript or of products containing Ghostscript. Commercial distribution of Ghostscript requires an Artifex commercial license ”for which there is a royalty. Peter Deutsch, the author of Ghostscript and the first practitioner of this scheduled licensing model by which commercial time-advantages can be paid for, describes the Aladdin Free Public License this way:
The Aladdin Free Public License imposes certain specific restrictions on distribution. Among other things, it prohibits the commercial distribution of Ghostscript software if any payment is made. The license describes (in section 2) some types of distribution that are not allowed:
In many other respects, the Aladdin Free Public License reads like the GPL. Like the GPL it allows examination of the source code and the creation and distribution of derivative works. It even contains a reciprocity condition:
Artifex Software, the commercial distributor of Ghostscript, simultaneously sells licenses to new versions of the program under commercial licenses. Those licenses allow customers to embed the most recent versions of Ghostscript into their printers. They also allow commercial licensees to use the source code in any way they wish, and they do not impose reciprocity obligations for derivative works. Approximately one year after a version of Ghostscript is made available under the Aladdin Free Public License and its commercial licenses, Artifex Software re-releases that version under the GPL, at which point the software becomes truly open source. The incentives for Artifex customers to buy commercial licenses are obvious. They can use the very latest versions of the software, with all the latest features. They can contract for the support of Artifex Software engineers to help them create their own products and derivative works. They can purchase warranties. That extra time and those added-value services make scheduled licensing succeed as an open source business model. But such software isn't initially open source, and its licensors promise only that it eventually will be. |
< Day Day Up > |