From an interview with Matt Asay in LinuxWorld on Alfresco:
The community felt otherwise and we were uncomfortable with that and so I made the decision to go to the GPLv2, which has been fantastic for the company in all respects. I mean literally, leads went up, page views went up, downloads went up, our registered community went up in significant percentages. Our sales went up 50 percentage. Our average sales price went up 25 percent, meaning the size of the deals went up. We’re now getting a thousand, two thousand leads per week. So everything was positive from it. we’ve made more money, not less. We have more community, not less. More community involvement. And that was the big driver behind it, is we wanted to license Alfresco under a license that meant that nobody had to be concerned with the company. Any developer out there, whether they’re a Drupal developer looking for robust repository to use with Drupal. And we’ve actually talked with the Drupal team, with Dries, the founder of Drupal, about this. Anybody who wanted to have a piece that Alfresco had, we didn’t want them to have to think about well, I don’t really want to deal with Alfresco’s company. I don’t trust them. They’re a corporation. They might be nice guys, but their interests are not aligned with ours. And so putting it under the GPL seemed like the best way to do that. It was making it completely free of Alfresco’s influence other than our development influence in continuing to add to that store of code that we’re writing.
Pretty glowing comments and results from switching from an attribution license to the GPL.
In other commercial GPL news, NetBeans 6.0 will be dual-licensed with CDDL/GPL+Classpath.
(For context, see BMC using the BSD.)
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