The Blue Frog Takes the King's Shilling

I've an article over on Linux Journal that looks at dual licensing. The issue of how you might make money out of open source software is important, not just to the coders but also to the users. If the former don't feel that they've received enough payback - of whatever kind - they are likely to move on, and the latter will then suffer.

So I was interested to see the news that everybody's favourite blue frog - Azureus - has taken some venture capital money to turn "legit", or at least corporate. There's no reason why this should have any downside for the free version: presumably they aim to produce paid-for, customised versions for content producers etc. In fact, it might even help educate the latter that BitTorrent is not synonymous with evil.