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As a owner of an open source project you'd want people to contribute and make it better, right?
But if you then decide to throw on a nice tasty licencing model for people to use the software [Corporate or otherwise], do you get rights to all the income? if so why would people bother contributing? They could be doing all the work while you, the owner, reap all the rewards?
This just seems wrong to me, maybe i'm misunderstanding it.
In projects that have dual licensing (like Qt or MySQL) the biggest incentive to contributing is getting changes your own local changes (bug fixes, and so on) accepted into upstream therefore reducing the need to create and maintain local forks.
The open source project you are contributing to may be important to you, as it is.
Let's take the example of Mono which is open source, but licensed to corporation:
Mainsoft, one of the most prolific contributor of the project uses the code for its own .NET to Java compiler. The company clearly don't care than the license owner, relicense their work to corporations. It's a win-win scheme.
This just seems wrong to me, maybe i'm misunderstanding it.
You are. Open Source is in itself a protected term. A project under Open Source license is using a license that has been approved by the OSI – and all those licenses imply, by definition, that the licensed product is free (as in free beer)1). There is no discussion about that.
CKEditor is an instance of double licensing. But their commercial license does not negate the fact that it’s also OSS, which makes it free for you, if you can abide by the remaining terms of that license. If you can’t, your only choice is to pick the non-free commercial usage license.
As a developer, if you contribute to an Open Source project, you are contributing to a free project. Sure, the maintainer may still make money from it, but so what? It’s still free to use and modify for everybody who wants to. As a “service in return”, if you will, the maintainer makes sure that updates are incorporated into the code, pushed to distributors and published.
1) First point of the Open Source Definition
