Ask HN: Is dual-licensing a good way to try to monetize an open-source project?

2 points

8 years ago

Over the last year or so I worked on a (GPLv3-licensed) project in the dev-ops space, which spawned a few smaller side-projects. Although I'm quite happy with how all of those turned out, I have no idea whether I'll see any adoption. I certainly didn't follow any of the common advice about creating MVPs and get customer feedback early and all that, which was a deliberate decision because this was something I really wanted to see exist, and I'm ok with how that reduces chances of adoption/success.

Long story short, I'd like to continue working on it should it gain any traction. To be able to do so I would need to figure out a way to make at least some money out of it. One option (among others I'm looking into) I see would be to dual-license the code with a commercial license in addition to GPLv3. Companies who want to integrate the code in their products but don't want GPLv3 would be able to purchase such a license.

I'm not quite sure how that would work with external contributions though (if I'd get any in the first place of course). If those are GPLv3 too, then I couldn't really sell 'non-GPLv3' licenses to 3rd parties, right? I don't like the idea of forcing people to assign copyright of their contributions to me, so I thought I could maybe ask for contributions to be Apache v2? Would that work, legally?

And if so, how could I best setup a contribution 'pipeline'? There's cla-assistant ( https://github.com/cla-assistant/cla-assistant ), which let's people easily sign contributor agreements before allowing pull requests on Github, but that doesn't work on Gitlab where my code lives at the moment. Are there any examples of other projects working in a similar way and how are those setup?

1 comment