alt Hacker NewsWhat are people's thoughts/experiences about dual licencing?
Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee?
If you've done this, has it been successful? Obviously there's been many projects relicense over recent years (terraform, redis, etc) - but it's less clear to me if this is a viable path for new projects starting out, or if it just kills adoption from the beginning.
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In practice AGPL might achieve that. It does allow commercial use, but a lot of big businesses, especially big tech, will not use it. On the other hand it is a clear, OSI approved, FOSS license.
Yes. The clean way is to use the strongest copyleft license you can find, probably AGPL. Even if corporations are technically allowed to use it, they don't want to risk touching it with a three-meter pole. Then you offer to sell them a different license. Hobbyists and OSS folks usually have no issue with AGPL.
The usual way I've seen it work is using the AGPL.
AGPL doesn't bar use in commercial production, but the requirements usually scare off any corporate from using it in production.
No success yet, but I recently found BUSL - used by Terraform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License
It stops companies from building high-revenue products for free, while not being as scary as AGPL/LGPL from the business perspective, and completely unrestricted for everyone else (despite not being technically an open-source license).
If you are trying to monetize your software, the biggest factor is whether or not your customer trusts you.
MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.
So, we wind up alienating all potential customers because we are so worried about preventing ideological crime.
People will steal your ideas and they will get away with it. The more you react to this in first order terms, the more it will destroy you.
Most money in software is made with support contracts, not the initial sale.
Isn't that what Epic, MiniMax, Z.ai, and others are doing, where a license is free for personal use / low revenue projects, but cost a (steep) fee for commercial use? They don't use dual licenses, but rather a tiered license.
I think it definitely hurts adoption. No hobbyist or experimenter wants to delve into legalities head first by first having to understand the licensing terms of software, whereas permissive licenses like MIT and Apache 2.0 are easily-understood and familiar.
The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business. And what you open source, you do it under a permissive license so people don't feel limited should they wish to play around with it.
A more restrictive license might be more apt if you don't really want to open source, but you must for regulatory reasons.