Ahoy hoy,
first of all, I understand your desire to engage with proprietary vendors in a more nuanced way than to just tell them "If you don't like the GPL, just go away." However, such an approach does come with certain problems and controversies. Most importantly, you create a conflict of interest for the receiving organization where their financial success is at odds with strengthening Copyleft software. Bradley Kuhn puts it very good in his recent Keynote[0] at FOSDEM, where he says „At this point, we would get paid to just look the other way.“ The whole presentation is a very good listen regarding copyleft, copyleft defense and freedom VS popularity of your code.
Agner Fog agner@agner.org wrote:
I have asked the FSF, but they are not willing to sell licenses, and frankly they are quite difficult to communicate with. That's why I am now taking the discussion to FSFE. Is there any other suitable non-profit organization who could be the copyright owner and sell licenses?
Honestly, I don't think you'll find one, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. For any NPO with the main goal to protect and strengthen Free Software, buying yourself out of the need to comply with the GPL would just be inherently at odds with their core mission.
I understand that telling proprietary vendors to either "deal with" the GPL or go away feels like a waste of ressources and opportunity, but I honestly believe that any other position leads us down a very very slippery slope that in the end will not lead to more free software, but a weaker, watered-down version of copyleft that I personally wouldn't want.
Best, Simon