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Comment by marijn | Hacker News Reader

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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