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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

This is already a solved problem. It's the author's Option 3, but without the silly guilt and donation pieces.

Dual license your thing so that it can be used commercially for a specified monthly fee, with a mechanism for paying that fee (and that fee being actually spelled out rather than handwaved at as in the article). You've written useful software. Charge for it.

Asking for donations physically can't work, as the commercial organizations you'd want to donate often don't have the legal ability to do so. They can buy things. They can't give money away.

Again, it's solved. The author just seems to feel bad about the solution, so he's trying to implement it while apologizing for every step. Seems a bit silly.

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> They can buy things. They can't give money away.

Can someone explain this to me? Many corporations support the Red Cross, the American Cancer Society, youth basketball clubs, etc. in various ways.

Why is contributing to the advancement of science and public goods any different? It seems like that should be easier to justify if certain technology is critical to your business model.

That money is usually budgeted for charity, and probably can only go to "legal" charities (at least in the US there are tax benefits to this)

It is probably much harder to compete for a piece of that budget, and also there are a lot of hoops to jump through to become a "legal" charity (in the US, I don't know about other places). Since companies are already used to purchasing software, that is probably a much simpler way to go.

I think they can. Just call it a purchase. That's what I do. I have "purchased" licenses from many MIT licensed projects. I intend to do it for every one I put into my project (once I have it figured out). Also, libre office, mozilla, etc. It just goes into the 'software' account.

I don't think the IRS is going to give a shit. Other companies may have shareholders who cry a little, but they could do it, at least to some level. Sending some love to Debian is a better option than paying for a MS license in some cases.

I think that the companies can and should support FOSS more. Especially if they don't want everything to end up GPL'd.

Dual licensing was option #2, and I explained explicitly why I didn't consider it a good option.

No, Option 2 was Dual Licensing using a mean version of GPL to make it awkward to use your thing commercially. You actually went out of your way to title it "Difficult Open Source".

You can still do separate hobbyist/commercial licensing with your MIT license, and not impose any restrictions on your users. Apart from asking your commercial customers to pay.

So how will companies that 'don't give money way' be convinced to pay for MIT-licensed software, then?

Because that's the deal they made with you when they started using it. "You may use this software free of charge for non-commercial uses. Commercial use is allowed under our [Commercial Use Agreement][0]", etc. etc.

You're selling software to companies with legal departments for an amount that, frankly, isn't worth the hassle of trying to scam you out of at the risk of you suing them. Companies really do pay for software based only on the software company asking them to do so.

Then it isn't MIT licensed. The MIT license allows for commercial use.

If you release something under MIT, you _can't_ actually constrain commercial use.

Amazing. I didn't know that. The lengths software people will go to avoid getting compensated for their work, eh?

So yeah, scratch the above then. You'll have to dual license with a modified license for non-commercial use. Same idea, slightly different execution (but still no need to go to GPL extremes if you don't want to).

Any non-commercial license will have to have implications similar to the GPL, and thus scare off most users, prevent projects from wanting to incur this as a dependency, and so on. It is one way to go, but will seriously limit reach. Also, as I said, it'll require contributors to sign over their rights.

For reference http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.

The GP said "asking" commercial customers to pay, which you can.

You're right too, you can't constrain commercial use but that doesn't mean you _can't_ sell something that you MIT license it just means that people have the option to try and acquire your MIT licensed software from one of your licensees (or their sub-licensees, etc.) instead.

Note to readers: It's 2015 and Apache 2 is preferred in all contexts instead of BSD (2- or 3-) or MIT.

If you use the MIT license, what's to stop the large company from simply using it under the MIT license?

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