Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by NeutronBoy 3321 days ago
> 2. Commercial license

Not sure if this is what you were referring to, but the article notes

"With Fuchsia, Google would not only be dumping the Linux kernel, but also the GPL: the OS is licensed under a mix of BSD 3 clause, MIT, and Apache 2.0. "

1 comments

Duel licensing.

Google will have a "technically open source" version but OEM's will be required to buy the separately licensed google version to include things like the play store and gmail.

>Duel licensing.

I don't think that's legal, but it's a pretty interesting idea. Instead of just mandating a license, the vendor and customer can each advocate a license, and then have a duel to determine which license to use. Of course, each side would have to find someone willing to risk death in a duel (and one of them would have to die, for it to be a real duel), just for the sake of their employer. Do you think it'd be better to have a duel with swords or pistols? I guess they could water it down and remove the death requirement, perhaps by having the combatants do fencing or wrestling or something like that.

The worst part is I actually thought about the fuel/dual thing when I wrote it but still picked the wrong one.
Dual-licensing in that sense is far more common with GPL'd apps/libraries where the copyright holder offers a separate commercial license for the same code.

The Fuchsia source is primarily BSD licensed (with some MIT bits like the Magenta kernel, and some third party code generally of the MIT/BSD/Apache2/Zlib varieties).

Unless I'm mistaken dual licensing GPL'd code also requires holding the initial copyright. It also adds complications around outside contributions. With BSD they can accept contributions under that license and still license it themselves.