3 ms·

what about a non-commercial use license for free, and a commercial use license for a fee ? - the software's author get money from his work and thus can go on p

what about a non-commercial use license for free, and a commercial use license for a fee ? - the software's author get money from his work and thus can go on provide good software to people - only the ones with money needs to pay - people without money get your product for free... you dont loose money as they wont buy your product anyway and they give you community and adverstissement for free. http://www.longtailvideo.com/ http://www.longtailvideo.com/ jw player seems to do well with this schema. am i missing something ?

nrr 17y ago
Piracy becomes a concern with this model. The one that makes the most sense, that I've seen, is pretty much what Sun is doing right now. Give the (foundation operating environment) software away for free but charge for the polished chrome and low-response technical support.
- jerome_etienne 17y ago
  It is easy to pirate in both cases (all paid, or part free/part paid). Nevertheless in practice, companies dislikes to pirate, especialy for a prize tag as low as 20$ (for current example). It is even more obvious in this case as it is to build web applications, all those applications will have the same 280north look. So trivial to identify any piracy. selling support is nice but very hard to scale.
  - nrr 17y ago
    Well, granted, piracy's going to happen nonetheless, and it's still going to be a niggling issue no matter how you look at it. Two ways to curtail it: give the foundation parts away for free and charge what people are willing to pay for the rest. Support's easy as sin to scale. Certification programs are a good way to accomplish this; they establish a trust chain and also provide yet another revenue stream to take advantage of. Maybe your customers would rather purchase a support contract through one of your Certified Professionals® instead for one reason or another. A good use case would be because your customers feel most comfortable dealing with someone who can speak French, but you only provide support in English and German.
dagw 17y ago
I actually think the way they are doing it is now is quite good. The underlying framework and API are all open source and free to use, but they charge for what seems to essentially be an IDE. You're free to develop apps with their framework for free using your text editor of choice, and if you really want you can write your own IDE and other tools on top of their framework to ease development. However if you want to use their IDE you have to pay.
- jerome_etienne 17y ago
  said like that it makes good sense. thanks
nailer 17y ago
Yep, that would stop the app being open source. Lamson and ghostscript have two novel approaches: Lamson: gpl or paid license without lgpl version Ghostscript: 6 month delayed OSS release, immediate proprietary license release.
stephen 17y ago
Per emmett's comment, I doubt Hibernate would have become ubiquitous had it been dual-licensed GPL/commercial from day 1. There have been other commercial Java ORM/JPA/JDO/etc. implementations that were quite good (okay, not all of them, but the name of one in particular escapes me) but Hibernate won out because it was free. That it's primary strength (being LGPL free) also makes it hard to monetize is the conundrum. I think 280north's price point might be the right idea--anything <$100 (per project, not per seat) should be discretionary income to most any commercial development project and you can make up the low license cost with scale in wide spread adoption.

nrr 17y ago

Piracy becomes a concern with this model. The one that makes the most sense, that I've seen, is pretty much what Sun is doing right now. Give the (foundation operating environment) software away for free but charge for the polished chrome and low-response technical support.

jerome_etienne 17y ago
It is easy to pirate in both cases (all paid, or part free/part paid). Nevertheless in practice, companies dislikes to pirate, especialy for a prize tag as low as 20$ (for current example). It is even more obvious in this case as it is to build web applications, all those applications will have the same 280north look. So trivial to identify any piracy. selling support is nice but very hard to scale.
- nrr 17y ago
  Well, granted, piracy's going to happen nonetheless, and it's still going to be a niggling issue no matter how you look at it. Two ways to curtail it: give the foundation parts away for free and charge what people are willing to pay for the rest. Support's easy as sin to scale. Certification programs are a good way to accomplish this; they establish a trust chain and also provide yet another revenue stream to take advantage of. Maybe your customers would rather purchase a support contract through one of your Certified Professionals® instead for one reason or another. A good use case would be because your customers feel most comfortable dealing with someone who can speak French, but you only provide support in English and German.

dagw 17y ago

I actually think the way they are doing it is now is quite good. The underlying framework and API are all open source and free to use, but they charge for what seems to essentially be an IDE. You're free to develop apps with their framework for free using your text editor of choice, and if you really want you can write your own IDE and other tools on top of their framework to ease development. However if you want to use their IDE you have to pay.

jerome_etienne 17y ago
said like that it makes good sense. thanks

nailer 17y ago

Yep, that would stop the app being open source. Lamson and ghostscript have two novel approaches: Lamson: gpl or paid license without lgpl version Ghostscript: 6 month delayed OSS release, immediate proprietary license release.

stephen 17y ago

Per emmett's comment, I doubt Hibernate would have become ubiquitous had it been dual-licensed GPL/commercial from day 1. There have been other commercial Java ORM/JPA/JDO/etc. implementations that were quite good (okay, not all of them, but the name of one in particular escapes me) but Hibernate won out because it was free. That it's primary strength (being LGPL free) also makes it hard to monetize is the conundrum. I think 280north's price point might be the right idea--anything <$100 (per project, not per seat) should be discretionary income to most any commercial development project and you can make up the low license cost with scale in wide spread adoption.