§4.4 Open source as a licensing scheme
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of university research; it continues the academic tradition of insisting on proper credit for contributors, but imposes no real restrictions on use of the licensed software. Such a licence, of course, leaves room for proprietary strategies that free ride on contributions released under the BSD without contributing their own improvements back into the commons. This need not necessarily be a serious disincentive to developer contributions, especially in the biotechnology context, where (in principle if not always in practice) publication can block downstream appropriation by creating prior art.111 However, historically such proprietary strategies have been perceived by many software developers as an abuse. As we have seen, the GPL is designed explicitly to prevent this abuse by insisting that enhancements, derivatives and tools that incorporate the technique are also released under the GPL. As Behlendorf points out, this essentially eliminates the option of making money through software value-adding, but the GPL could still be used as a competitive weapon to establish a platform that discourages competitive platforms from being created and protects the original developer’s position as the leading provider of products and services that sit upon this platform. Behlendorf also notes that the GPL could be used for business purposes as a technology sentinel, with a non-GPLed version of the same tool available for a price (using dual licences).112 Further towards the proprietary end of the spectrum (maximum freedom for original intellectual property owners, fewer freedoms for users) lies the Mozilla Public Licence, or MPL; yet further on lies the Netscape Public Licence, or NPL. Like the GPL, the MPL requires that changes be released under the same licence, therefore making them available back to the development community. The NPL was developed by Netscape for open sourcing the Navigator Web browser, and contains special privileges that apply to Netscape, specifically the ability to relicence modifications authored by other contributors under a closed licence. The NPL experience highlights the risks to building an effective developer community associated with a licence that retains too many rights to appropriate contributions in the hands of a corporate sponsor; we return to this point in a later chapter (section 7.2.4, page 215).113 Multiple licences attached to a single technology As in the biotechnology context where multiple owners control complementary intellectual assets, different licences may apply to different modules within a single program. For example, Red Hat Linux consists of about 2,800 modules,114 and by one calculation, there are more than 17 licence types represented among them: about 65% are licensed under the GPL or Lesser GPL; about 17% are licensed under the MIT licence or its close relative the BSD; nearly 7% are licensed under 111
I am indebted to one of my (anonymous) thesis examiners for suggesting this clarification. Behlendorf (1999). 113 I am indebted to the same examiner for this point and form of words. 114 Rosen et al. (2003), p.4. 112