The quotation from my 2005 Open Source Licensing book drew an update from Peter Deutsch. He asked that I update the history. Here it is:
While your account was accurate for quite a few years, Artifex eventually abandoned the AFPL / GPL division, I believe because they found that it was a bit of complexity that didn't affect their revenue from commercial licensing. Instead, they simply offered the choice of either GPL or a straight commercial license. In addition, I believe they offered performance-enhancing replacements for certain modules that were only available to commercial licensees. (The ones I remember hearing about were things like halftoning or shading code that used processor-specific SIMD capabilities.) At the same time, they put quite a bit of energy into identifying and taking legal action against commercial users who were violating the GPL, of which there were an astoundingly large number. For the last several years this actually resulted in substantial revenue, from retroactive commercial license payments and from new commercial license agreements: some offenders started complying with the GPL, some obtained commercial licenses, and some stopped using the code altogether. This email from Peter is a reminder that open source is an evolving ecosystem. /Larry BCC: Lawrence Rosen 707-478-8932 3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482 lro...@rosenlaw.com <mailto:lro...@rosenlaw.com>
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