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

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.