Commericalizing The GPL

Gianugo Rabellino has a great post on the use of the GPL versus more permissive licenses in commerical settings. I find this interesting because lately I’ve been considering the open source strategy we plan to take with JadeTower. The advantage of the GPL is that companies can dual license. However, to be able to dual license the company has to have the rights to all contributions. IMHO this limits the attractiveness of the project to outside contributors. It puts contributors and the original copyright owner on unequal ground, which is against the idea of the GPL and open source in general. Personally, I perfer the approach the Eclipse Foundation has taken: a permissive license that encourages a community, both commerical and non-commerical. Now, if only Adobe would do something similar with Flex and Apollo.