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by Eliah_Lakhin
724 days ago
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Thank you for your feedback! I agree with your point about the licensing. I would also add that tools for the development of compiler front-ends are quite a niche market. So, honestly speaking, I don't plan to earn much from my project regardless of the license terms. This work is part of a higher-level in-progress toolset, which is closer to the end users. I have dedicated it as a separate project primarily for public preview, with some restrictions on distribution and use, as I haven't decided on the overall toolset distribution model yet. But it is possible that I will change the licensing terms of Lady Deirdre in the future to something less restrictive (maybe even MIT) to make it more popular, this is just not my current goal. I apologize for any inconvenience my current licensing terms may cause. |
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Friendly advice from a stranger, worth what it costs: I believe the greatest inconvenience of a commercial license will be to _you_, as opposed to end-users.
The market is so saturated with open source, developers expect it, and commercial licenses cause huge usage friction and doubt.
The "dual license" died as a viable business model around the time Meta (née Facebook) and Microsoft starting investing billions into free-as-in-beer OSS, 10-15 years ago.
Today, this model will only sabotage usage. People using your OSS is good. Even if your goal isn't to become popular, usage & feedback are learning, and while it's fine for popularity not to be a goal, I would encourage you not to proactively target the opposite of popularity.
If you have some other IP (the other tech you're describing) that can remain proprietary or wrapped behind a service, then people using other pieces of your stack for free is a _really good thing._ At least, they're aware of your brand and have started to trust it. At best, they're ready to use your commercial offering out of the gate.