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Huh, TIL. Out of curiosity, is there a license that would allow them to be FOSS only for non-commercial use, but having customers pay for commercial use, like t
by semi-extrinsic 11y ago
Huh, TIL. Out of curiosity, is there a license that would allow them to be FOSS only for non-commercial use, but having customers pay for commercial use, like they want?
- ceejayoz 11y agoNo, placing such restrictions makes it neither free nor open source. It'd be "shared source", perhaps.
- hardwaresofton 11y agoCan someone please point to some credible source with a clear explanation how of how you're supposed to license F/OSS for profit? I can't figure it out.
- ceejayoz 11y agoSupport and additional services. For example, WordPress.com does pretty well, despite the codebase being GPLed. Same for RedHat - they're quite successful despite all their packages being available via CentOS, because of paid support subscriptions, certifications, etc.
- hardwaresofton 11y agoBut what about companies like highcharts? Just answered my own question: http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html
- ceejayoz 11y agoYep. Creative Commons isn't FOSS.
- detaro 11y agoOr assume that GPL is painful enough (or for server code AGPL) that companies would rather pay for a license than dealing with it. (Especially browser JS is something where you'll find gigantic discussions about exactly how far GPL infects other code)
- ansgri 11y agoDual-license under CC-BY-NC-SA and a proprietary one?
- slavik81 11y agoIt's often difficult to use GPL libraries commercially anyways. One way of handling things is to just make it GPL, and sell an alternative proprietary license. Qt does this quite successfully, and the FSF thinks its a reasonable way of doing things. https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoAh, yes, that's what I was thinking about. If you dual-license as "free with GPL or pay for alternative license", companies likely won't use the GPL option because they don't want their own code to end up GPL'd. This strategy probably works much better if your customers are big companies with IP lawyers than if they're a startup or a random hacker building a service.