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I've always thought that selling license exceptions could be a good business model: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions https://www.fsf.org/blogs/r

by tyleo 6y ago

I've always thought that selling license exceptions could be a good business model: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions Basically, your software is copyleft unless a user pays for an exception. I've thought that it may be a reasonable business to offer a service to owners of popular GitHub repos to somehow get started with this business model. Anyone who quits maintaining popular OSS in rage (as has happened a few times) stands to gain more by simply changing the license and then charging non-OSS users in the future. Edit: Thanks for the comments explaining. I was unaware of the barriers to this path.

api 6y ago
This is not new. It's called dual-licensing. It's very hard to do for a number of reasons.
- richardwhiuk 6y ago
  It means you have to CLA all contributions, which decreases the number of external contributions you get, as contributions are all taking someone elses work.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
That's dual licensing. It's mostly relevant to software libraries or anything that can be included into another product but for end users it has no benefit at all.