I want to use open source software for my business, and it is dual licensed. If I choose the paid license which provides support for any changes we require, will this mean that we are unable to change to a different support provider in future?
In this article I was concerned by the following suggestion:
Some vendors operate on a 'dual-licence' business model, in which customers can buy a license to get access to the vendor's support team or to extra features and extensions for the core software, such as management tools.
According to Mark Driver, an analyst at Gartner, the overwhelming majority of commercial open-source efforts today are based on a dual-licence model.
Customers should know, he says, that with this option, "the open-source-ness of the product comes into question".
While open-source software licences cost less than commercial software licences, they include terms and conditions that restrict your use and lock you into a vendor.
Was this a valid concern at the time the article was written (2010) and does it still apply to dual licensed software today?