
Ask HN: Is dual-licensing a good way to try to monetize an open-source project? - tripalip
Over the last year or so I worked on a (GPLv3-licensed) project in the dev-ops space, which spawned a few smaller side-projects. Although I&#x27;m quite happy with how all of those turned out, I have no idea whether I&#x27;ll see any adoption. I certainly didn&#x27;t follow any of the common advice about creating MVPs and get customer feedback early and all that, which was a deliberate decision because this was something I really wanted to see exist, and I&#x27;m ok with how that reduces chances of adoption&#x2F;success.<p>Long story short, I&#x27;d like to continue working on it should it gain any traction. To be able to do so I would need to figure out a way to make at least some money out of it. One option (among others I&#x27;m looking into) I see would be to dual-license the code with a commercial license in addition to GPLv3. Companies who want to integrate the code in their products but don&#x27;t want GPLv3 would be able to purchase such a license.<p>I&#x27;m not quite sure how that would work with external contributions though (if I&#x27;d get any in the first place of course). If those are GPLv3 too, then I couldn&#x27;t really sell &#x27;non-GPLv3&#x27; licenses to 3rd parties, right? I don&#x27;t like the idea of forcing people to assign copyright of their contributions to me, so I thought I could maybe ask for contributions to be Apache v2? Would that work, legally?<p>And if so, how could I best setup a contribution &#x27;pipeline&#x27;? There&#x27;s cla-assistant ( https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cla-assistant&#x2F;cla-assistant ), which let&#x27;s people easily sign contributor agreements before allowing pull requests on Github, but that doesn&#x27;t work on Gitlab where my code lives at the moment. Are there any examples of other projects working in a similar way and how are those setup?
======
brudgers
Dual licensing will generate money if the software has customers willing to
pay the dual licensing fee. Finding those customers is non-trivial, basically
it's commercial sales and having a GPL version probably makes sales harder
because you are competing against free.

Good luck

