Comment by astrange
4 months ago
There's two models that solve this.
a) sell support contracts
b) have contributors sign copyright agreements, license the project as GPL/AGPL, and then sell commercial licenses for people who can't use that
4 months ago
There's two models that solve this.
a) sell support contracts
b) have contributors sign copyright agreements, license the project as GPL/AGPL, and then sell commercial licenses for people who can't use that
c) Open core model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model
which seems to be by far the most common
No, they don’t.
Selling support contracts is actually hard.
GPL/AGPL preclude widespread adoption (these days) — the grandparent explicitly mentioned “permissive” licenses.
All businesses are hard, but I don't think selling support is especially hard for one. The above two are how x264 development was funded, but it's also how Klara works for BSD and Igalia for web browsers.