I had an interesting conversation last night with some Novell folks
about Open Source and the GPL. They were indicating that iFolder
had been put into “Open Source”, but that they would also be selling an
“Enterprise Version” of the product. Sounds good … a way to
make money on Open Source.

What surprised me was that they then indicated that they were not going
to release the “Enterprise Version” into Open Source. What?
I thought the GPL had the “viral” effect. Nope, they said …
they are retaining the copyrights. On top of that, they are
requiring anyone contributing to the projects to sign over their rights
and copyrights. Whoa … now this sounds weird to me.

I
have to admit that I don’t understand a lot of this, however this seems
extremely counter to the GPL. I’m going to investigate more,
however it appears that the following is somehow the path that Novell
is pursuing:

• Release projects into Open Source under the GPL
• Retain all copyrights
• Require contributors to transfer all rights to Novell
• Release proprietary, commercial versions of the software for money
• Include Open Source contributions in proprietary, commercial versions
• Prevent anyone else from creating commercial versions using the GPL

Is this correct? Can anyone really do this?

They indicated that MySQL, SleepyCat, and others are doing exactly this … I’m going to dig further …