Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ximm 1100 days ago
There is a subtle but important difference here though:

If you publish a piece of software under two licenses, one open source and one commercial, why would anybody pick the commercial one?

You cannot say "corporations have to pick the commercial one". The only way to do that would be to include a term in the open source license so it cannot be used by corporations. But then it would no longer meet the open source definition. "Free for private use but payed for commercial use" is not open source!

But if the open source license is copyleft (e.g. GPL), any software that uses it would also have to be open source. So dual licensing allows corporations to pay to keep their own code a secret.

This implies that dual licensing is pointless for non-copyleft licenses like MIT, and also for developer tooling that is not directly used in the final product.

2 comments

> Why would anybody pick the commercial one?

The OpenSource license is typically GPLv3 that imposes that your whole application has to be GPLv3. This is enough for corporations to avoid it.

You might want the logos
so you have an about window that says "look how lazy i was, i used all this software i dont support and you still have to pay me full price"

idk. it reaaaaally _isnt_ that big a selling point to see all the open source projects one has used in a commercial application as you might be thinking