Why have just one license when you can have 5?
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I'd love to learn more about the background of this strategy
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Seem very complicated to me, my experience with other companies is usually 'if its not MIT/Apache2' we can't /won't use it out of principle. So this requires a lot of understanding from the other side to even attempt it.
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Especially bigger corps have rather stodgy/non-understanding legal departments. So i'm curious why the license is the way it is.
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Two core principles:
1. Be as permissive as possible (i.e. most of the project is Apache)
2. If I need to support my work later by offering some paid premium tier, deter free-riding commercial competitors (i.e. application layer is copyleft)
We have a similar worry around 2., however our plan currently is 'yolo' if people try to compete with our own product with us that seems.. possibly not a big deal.
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I think it is a big deal! It's happened again and again in the COSS space. Additionally, Khan Academy had to deal with people who repackaged the source with a new name then charged people for it, which caused confusion and indirectly harmed the brand.
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The other complexity is about trying to add permissivity to the above:
1. The application layer is copyleft… but is relicensed permissively on a rolling three-year window.
2. Official binaries are licensed permissively because Google won't allow running copyleft binaries.