4 ms·

Damages. Offer two licenses. One GPL and the other commercial. Make the commercial license as costly as possible, even Oracle grade by charging per core. Inclu

by hda2 5y ago

Damages. Offer two licenses. One GPL and the other commercial. Make the commercial license as costly as possible, even Oracle grade by charging per core. Include language stating that the licensing agreement falls back to the commercial license if the GPL is violated and the violation is not remedied according to the provisions set in the GPL. Any licensing fees collected get poured back into the open source project. If another company is stupid enough to ignore these terms, I'm sure you can find someone willing to sue on your behalf for a fraction of the damages owed to you.

guitarbill 5y ago
Is there an easy way of providing commercial licences? Has anybody had experiences with this? I've seen Super Source (https://supso.org/ https://supso.org/), which I think used to be called Supported Source (https://supportedsource.org https://supportedsource.org). It seems to make providing commercial licenses easy. But their website is pretty bare. Do people usually just roll their own with Square or Stripe? I've found it hard to get search results on this at all.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  If somebody is going to be paying you more than $1000, they'll contact you about it. You don't need to automate the license payments; you just need to check your email.
- semi-extrinsic 5y ago
  From my experience, RLM is one option that is widely used for this. FlexLM is another one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprise_License_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprise_License_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher
vipa123 5y ago
Do you have a real-world example of what a license like this looks like?
pabs3 5y ago
Most GPL projects aim for a diverse copyright holder base, with the code solely licensed under the GPL, so that no one entity can escape their GPL obligations by paying money. In that scenario it becomes harder to enforce the GPL, unless you have a principled copyright holder base with deep pockets. Hopefully the Software Freedom Conservancy lawsuit mentioned upthread will change that, they aim to set the precedent that anyone who receives GPL violating binaries can file GPL violation lawsuits.

by hda2 5y ago

guitarbill 5y ago

Is there an easy way of providing commercial licences? Has anybody had experiences with this? I've seen Super Source (https://supso.org/ https://supso.org/), which I think used to be called Supported Source (https://supportedsource.org https://supportedsource.org). It seems to make providing commercial licenses easy. But their website is pretty bare. Do people usually just roll their own with Square or Stripe? I've found it hard to get search results on this at all.

wizzwizz4 5y ago
If somebody is going to be paying you more than $1000, they'll contact you about it. You don't need to automate the license payments; you just need to check your email.
semi-extrinsic 5y ago
From my experience, RLM is one option that is widely used for this. FlexLM is another one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprise_License_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprise_License_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher

vipa123 5y ago

Do you have a real-world example of what a license like this looks like?

pabs3 5y ago

Most GPL projects aim for a diverse copyright holder base, with the code solely licensed under the GPL, so that no one entity can escape their GPL obligations by paying money. In that scenario it becomes harder to enforce the GPL, unless you have a principled copyright holder base with deep pockets. Hopefully the Software Freedom Conservancy lawsuit mentioned upthread will change that, they aim to set the precedent that anyone who receives GPL violating binaries can file GPL violation lawsuits.