[rmnclmnt]

Curious to know more about the commercial licensing scheme for Yaak: if i’ve read correctly, purchasing a pro license if based on « good faith » as the features are exactly the same as the MIT licensed Hobby version?

Sincere question, been studying lots of OSS commercial licensing and always wonder what works in which context

[gschier]

This is a conscious bet I'm making.

Yes, it's a good-faith license. The license doesn't even apply to the OSS version (only prebuilt binaries).

The bet is that super fans will pay for it in the early days and, as it gets adopted by larger companies, they will pay in order to comply with the legalities of commercial use. So far, it's working! The largest company so far is 34 seats, with a couple more in the pipe!

[throwing_away]

Having often thought this is how I would attempt to monetize if I built a developer tool, I'm glad to hear that it's working.

It makes good sense because companies actually have an absurd amount of liability to you if they violate your agreement.

[dylan604]

Without telemetry, how will you know that anyone at all is using your software let alone only within the agreement of any licensing terms?

[array_key_first]

You don't - ergo good faith.

You can be an Oracle and audit your customers and develop that adversarial relationship. The idea is that that sort of thing makes you rot in the long run.

[tharkun__]

How's that been going for Oracle so far?

[rhdhdjdofjnf]

Everyone of their executives can look forward to 10,000 years of burning in hell, so I’d say pretty badly

[47282847]

They may earn money but are totally rotten. They eat injured souls.

[array_key_first]

Pretty poorly actually, people avoid Oracle products like the plague. Nobody is buying a JVM from Oracle or buying their DB - they're using open source solutions that are both free and provide more features.

They have a lot of inerita, but that's it. If you're in Greenfield development, there is a close to 0% chance you will choose Oracle as your RDBMS.

Um, oops.

[1313ed01]

I am sure everyone making shareware in the early 1990's would have loved to spy on people to know how many used their software for free (and have a way to spam those users to try to sell more licenses), but they couldn't and just did without that.

[edoceo]

Excellent work! Looking forward your post about some milestone ARR boundary, the gory details of how you got there.

[gschier]

My runway reaches infinity around $10k MRR so I'll likely do a post around then. Currently 11% of the way there!

[stavros]

I was going to gripe about the price but $50/dev/year is actually pretty reasonable! Nice!

[rmnclmnt]

Thank you for your honest and detailed answer! Great to see it’s working so far and this allows you to build a true OSS product in the meantime, i really appreciate that (i think this is the biggest benefit of your licensing scheme)

[scrps]

I really like that, a scaling license!

I have a suggestion:

Under pricing for the hobby tier you could add as free or pay what you want. $50/yr isn't crazy but might get a few smaller donations if that was an avenue.

[gschier]

I currently direct these people to sponsor on GitHub

[maccard]

If I asked my security team could I use yaak, they would (probably) say yes, and legal would say under no circumstances am I to use a personal license, they will pay for a commercial license. Large companies are incredibly risk averse when it comes to stuff like this.