An Open-Source-Licensing Shift Bounty.

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.

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.