[open-source-ux]

Could your free version still be sold for a price but with limited or no support? For example, two licences

1. Commercial license, no support: pay $/£/€ amount

2. Commercial license with support: pay $/£/€ amount

By commerical use, I mean companies or academic insitutions. Option 1 is cheaper, but presumably more than affordable for companies who want to use the software.

I guess what I'm saying is that even when the software is open source, can you stipulate that payment is required if used by a commerical company or academic institution? Some companies may not pay, but I'm guessing many other companies will be happy to pay for option 1. Or am I being hopelessly naive?

[dalke]

While possible, that runs into another question: why would someone pay for support when they already have the software?

There are a few reasons: 1) they want to support new feature development, 2) they want to support me personally, or 3) they want support with understanding the API or doing integration.

I think most F/OS software has lousy documentation. I think that's because developers rarely like to write documentation, because free documentation writers are rare as hen's teeth, and because users aren't willing to pay for documentation.

Which is great if you want to sell your consulting services as well. That is, if the tool solves a problem, but is a hassle to use, then you get paid for configuration and customization. But that disincentivizes putting together a solid API with extensive documentation, where people don't need your help to understand how everything works.

> "even when the software is open source, can you stipulate that payment is required if used by a commerical company or academic institution?"

There are two issues. First, for the software to be open source, then there can be no legal mechanism to require later payment. What you propose is not "open source".

That said, it's might be possible to have a side agreement which does that. That agreement might not be legally enforceable, but a company will likely comply anyway, because they made the agreement in the first place.

But there's no way I'll obligate an academic group to pay me $20K should one of the grad students, or student with access to the shared disk, decide to redistribute it, after seeing that it's under an open source license. There's no way that will do me any long-term good.

[WalterBright]

If you stipulate that payment is required for commercial use, companies will pay. My experience is that commercial companies by and large are honest and quite willing to abide by the terms.