An Open-Source-Licensing Shift Bounty.

[Knuckle Duster]

I know a few people here understand the benefits, and regularly use open source software.

I'm curious if anybody knows of any situation where a proprietary piece of software was developed and sold; but the developer offered to punt it to the GPL at a set bounty?
Has that happened on anything notable or significant?

I know the FLOSS extremists would rather 'build their own' than pay for anything, and I know Google regularly 'buys' small companies and opens them for brand recognition's sake, but I can't think of any small developer making the shift themselves, 'for a set cost'.

I thought on this scenario before when going back to the Kega Fusion thread, and wondered about it.

[Devil N]

Well, the first example that comes to mind is id Software open sourcing the code of their engines (Wolf3D, Doom, Quake 1, 2 & 3) about 5 years after the release of each game. They're still doing it - the Doom 3 engine should go open source before long.

Another example of a project that gradually moved toward open source is the Qt widget toolkit. Initially it was released commercially under a proprietary license, but with each release the licensing terms became looser. A couple of months ago, it was finally released under LGPL, officially making it free and open source software.