"∙ Free for non-commercial and educational use."
"∙ Commercial use requires the purchase of a license."
and then
"Because of the support we've received from open source communities, we've decided to dual-license the code after 18 months - every commit, starting with 017c513, will be dual-licensed via the MIT License 18 months from that commit's date to master."
We wanted a model where, unlike completely proprietary licenses, the source code could be available - and, worst case, if something happened to the project - users could still have full access to it. And that all the work is eventually available in general.
Our first OSS drops - from 18 months ago - are coming in next month (July 2nd), so that'll be exciting. It will be interesting to see how it works out.
I do love the way you have the price so low.
Would much rather work on bug fixes and features! Just a necessary evil to be able to fund development. In an ideal world - could just write open source software and not worry about paying bills.
Can you put in a formal license statement saying that each change will become mit-licensed 18 months after it's committed? That way, there's no ambiguity if development stops and releases stop getting put in the oni2-mit repository.
That said, I think it's mainly down to companies that use the open source software to start paying for it. All companies that use open source software - and be fair, this is pretty much all software companies - should reserve some budget to sponsor and donate to open source project and developers.
Second, there's a lot of open source projects whose developers are paid for by a company, e.g. Linux, Chromium, etc. That code is still open source and free, AND the developers get paid.