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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

Is there a reason to not license it under a dual license?

Have the source code open with a non commercial license and also distribute the binaries under a commercial license.

I’m not sure that it will have a significant impact on the revenue since most people would likely opt out and purchase the binary rather than building it on their own.

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According to what I know, in case of desktop applications, the revenue drops almost to zero, unless you have a Free and Pro versions. "Free edition" then lacks almost all features that make the product competitive, and it's not really good.

It's reasonable, though, if your potential user base is totally different. For example, IntelliJ IDEA has a Community edition that lacks enterprise frameworks support, but that's not a problem for "single users" because they basically don't do any enterprise. But it looks like it won't work for Marta.

So I'd rather choose the Sublime Text strategy (though I think that Sublime costs too much).

Don’t listen to them. The HN crowd wants everything to be open-source, but likely wouldn’t want to pay for anything even if it was dual licensed. This seems to be a great product, and you deserve to charge for it and keep it closed source.

Most people won't but somebody else will make the builds and then offer those builds. Example: CentOS

See that's why I see CentOS as not necessarily a very good thing. It dents into the idea of making money with open source product.

Though in case of CentOS it probably helps more than it hurts. For RHEL, the product being sold and bought is not the bits, but the support.

This won't work for consumer facing desktop apps though.

Cant you have a license that forbids distributing binaries?

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