
Ask HN: Choosing an open-source license that's compatible with selling? - speps
I am in the process of choosing a license for a projet I&#x27;m doing. I want that code to be used in other open source projects freely. However, if people need to use it for a commercial product, they should acquire the rights from me.<p>What license would fit this? What choices are there? Any existing examples?<p>Thanks.
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detaro
Open-source can be used commercially. Forbidding all commercial usage is
incompatible with most definitions of "open-source" and thus all important
open-source licenses. Code that can't be used in a commercial product is
useless for most open-source projects as well.

Generally it is a common pattern to dual-license code as both a) GPL or AGPL
and b) a sold commercial license and hope that commercial users prefer to pay
instead of dealing with/thinking about the consequences of using the open-
source variant.

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mtmail
Those other open projects then need to tell all their users that part of their
code has additional restrictions in place, making in incompatible with their
licence.

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speps
I've seen dual licensed projects before.

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brudgers
I am not a lawyer.

A common dual license is GPL and a license that removes the copyleft
requirement and allows modifications to the code to be distributed without
source code.

There are a lot of implementation details, for example if part of the code
being licensed is GPL, then dual licensing the project can easily run afoul of
GPL.

My advice is if the project is going to be open source, focus less on a custom
license as a way of making money and more on providing valuable service to the
people using it. If making money off the license is the goal, then start with
a proprietary model and work backward form there over time.

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brudgers
I'm not clear what 'commercial product' means in this context.

