
Ask HN: How do you license and provide support if you sell Open Source? - codegeek
Lets say I offer a software as Open Source which clients can buy and self host. How would you license that ? Ok lets say we do MIT or GPL. Then how are you expected to provide support because what if the client changes something in the code. How do you ensure you can support them since they paid for it.
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kjksf
The reality is that neither dual licensing nor support is a viable option for
single devs for server-side software.

You can only sell scarcity. No one will pay you if they don't have to. People
are funny that way.

MIT license doesn't create scarcity at all. There's no reason to pay for MIT
licensed code because everyone has the right to use it for free, no strings
attached.

There are businesses build on dual-licensing GPL but it pretty much only works
for libraries that are part of software that would be distributed, like
desktop software or mobile apps. An example of such business is mupdf PDF
rendering library.

It works for re-distributable software because GPL would force the user of
mupdf library to open-source their whole app under GPL as well, which is not
possible for commercial apps (remember, they also sell scarcity). So they can
either spend years writing equivalent of mupdf or pay a commercial license
that lifts GPL restrictions.

That doesn't work for stand-alone, server side software. If the value is in
the product itself, I can install GPL-ed software. I don't get any additional
benefit from paying for a different license. There's no scarcity.

Selling support only works for very complicated software, like Cassandra, sold
to companies that are big enough that they can afford to pay a lot of money
for peace of mind.

You have to decide what you value more: writing open source software or making
money.

If making money, then stay away from open source. It's not impossible to make
money, but making money from commercial software is very hard and making money
from open-source is 10x harder than that.

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vlukereddy
liferay.com does it.

