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by karmakaze 2618 days ago
Hmm, wonder if there's something we can take away from this. Let's say the latest major release is AGPL (or newer dominant copyleft) and the previous major release is more enterprise friendly licensed with those offering paid support handling the security and maintenance of them. This means that the community can continue to develop and use the latest and greatest. Not perfect but it might work in some cases.
2 comments
galaxyLogic 2618 days ago
Sounds like an interesting idea. How about taking it even further and say what you say above but then also provide the latest and greatest release also as a commercial version. Then companies who want the latest will pay for it and OS community gets the latest with AGPL, while companies who prefer MIT license get a version that works but is not the latest or greatest.

That would be much like paying for support, getting the latest and greatest earlier than those who don't pay for it.

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karmakaze 2617 days ago
I wondered about combining it with dual licensing, but I don't even know how people do that today. Say if a whole community contributed to an AGPL project and it has a dual commercial license, who controls and profits from it?
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galaxyLogic 2617 days ago
Maybe all (registered) contributors would have to sign agreement that they give rights to publish also with commercial license to the corporation or non-profit that is in charge of the distribution. Would they be willing to do so? Well maybe they should get a cut of the profits.

That gets complicated managing all the payments, but I can see a single company using this model for their own benefit. Build momentum with the (two) OS licenses and get some income from the commercial license.

What could make this an attractive simple-to-manage model is that there would still be just one product, with different time-based releases of it, provided with a different license.

No need to fix bugs in the older releases, they are fixed in later versions. And everybody gets the fixes eventually but those who pay (or agree to AGPL) get them sooner.

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galaxyLogic 2615 days ago
"previous major release is more enterprise friendly ..."

Previous major release would not have the latest features but it would have the latest bug-fixes. That would be enterprise friendly.

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eitland 2618 days ago
As far as I can see this mught actually be a good idea if:

- you want to make your software as open as possible

- while still making money from it

It would require the manufacturer of the software to have some momentum but it sounds doable for some.

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