Which OSS license should I use?

Question

I am considering starting an OSS project and would like some advice.

I would like to use a license that allows you to use the project for free for personal and non-commercial use, but allows me to charge for a commercial license (for example, or http://www.extjs.com/company/dual.php ).

Can someone consult or link some articles on how to approach this? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

As described in the Open-Source description, you cannot restrict the use of your project if you want to remain open source. In other words: you cannot prohibit commercial use for an open source application. Thus, you can choose another (not open source) license that meets your requirements, or you will choose another method.

One possibility is to release only the source from an open source license and have another license for binary distributions. As far as I know, this is true for Java. This works well if building your application is a bit complicated.

You can release your application under the GPL. This does not prohibit commercial use. But if some kind of derivative work is being created, it must also be licensed by the GPL. This works well for libraries or similar materials that are not used alone, but in a combined product. EDIT . As DrJokepu mentions, using the GPL framework on the webserver stack will help avoid releasing your own sources. Therefore, one GPL extension is the Affero GPL, which requires you to release your work under one license (AGPL), even if you did not release it, and use it only to create a public web page. Therefore, for web services, you need AGPL to achieve the same result.

Answer 2

You cannot obtain an Open Source license with an OSI certificate and prohibit commercial use.

If you want someone to leave your software and sell their version as some kind of abbreviated software, you can use the GPL style license. For maximum compatibility, I would recommend GPLv2 + (Gnu General Public License, version 2 or any later version at your discretion). With this license, someone can sell your software, but they must clearly indicate that someone can get the source and that it can be freely redistributed. This, I think, covers most of the ones that people want to ban as commercial use.

Answer 3

The open source software release has an excellent dual-licensing section. It describes an approach in which a single entity, such as a foundation, “owns” copyright to the source of the projects.

The foundation chooses to make the source available in two different licensing schemes: one closed, one open. For your specific case, you will want to make sure that you adhere to a strong copyleft license (such as the GPL) to prevent commercial derivative works from freely available source code.

However, as others have noted, this does not stop commercial organizations from using your software, simply taking your work and selling it to others. In some cases, this works, oddly enough, many organizations prefer to buy something than download and use something for free. These are the same organizations that need legally binding contracts with suppliers and some form of support. That is, when you sell software, you actually sell a whole bunch of other services at the same time as the "packaged shrink product."

Now, how can you store and close code, as well as release under the GPL? The rationale that bends the legal part of the whole arrangement is that IP is not contributing to the fund under the GPL. In contrast, developers provide their IP fund under "sponsorship agreements" that transfer the copyright of their changes to the fund and allow the fund to issue a code under two different licenses. This last little caveat is the big drawback of dual licensing, sometimes developers are not interested in sponsorship agreements, they want the changes to be available only under an open source license and nothing more. There are quite a few sponsorship deals that write around the place, but here is the one that the sun uses for MySQL .