Eventual Source and Scheduled Licensing
In business, timing is everything. A few months' lead developing and commercializing a product can mean the difference between commercial success and failure. For some commercial licensees, obtaining access to the source code now rather than eventually may justify paying for those license rights.
This business reality has encouraged companies to create licensing strategies that generate revenue from customers willing to pay extra for additional lead time to develop their products.
Artifex Software, the distributor of Ghostscript, uses such a scheduled licensing model. Initially new versions of Ghostscript are not fully open source, but at a later time they become open source under the GPL.
Ghostscript is ...
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