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by zackbrown 722 days ago
> I apologize for any inconvenience my current licensing terms may cause.

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.