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Comment by edp | Hacker News Reader

OT, as the sole copyright owner of a web application I wrote, can I license it under the AGPL for the general public, and license it under different terms for clients who would prefer not to use AGPL software (and possibly pay for it) ? is dual licensing allowed by the AGPL ?

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Yes. But keep in mind that the copyright of any contributions you might get will be held by the author of that contribution, not by you. The contributor might license that contribution under the AGPL only, and thereby put a stop to your little scheme. You would have to either get a license from the contributor to your dual licensing scheme, or simply require all contributors to sign the copyright over to you, which is most commonly done in a so-called Contributor Licensing Agreement (CLA). However, CLAs are rightly disparaged for being unfair, in that it lets you, and only you, profit and monopolize what might become a community effort. A requirement of a CLA will most certainly discourage many, if not most, potential contributors from contributing.

I knew about this, that's why I said "sole copyright owner". The goal is to put the code out there and restrict other from modifying it without publishing their changes to their users. But I want to keep the option of licensing it differently for specific (b2b) clients. It's a not a true open source / free software in spirit as I don't plan to accept outside contributions.

You seem to be assuming that you are the only person who will ever contribute meaningfully to the software. But if, as you probably also hope, the software is widespead and successful, there will most probably arise at least one popular third-party extension/modification. And you will not be able to incorporate this addition into the product which you distribute to your b2b customers; this will make your version of the software inferior to the free version.

The other option is that could simply pay community members some fair portion of the b2b revenue in exchange for signing the CLA. If you're the primary contributor, it's fair to take most of the revenue for yourself, but revenue sharing with major contributors from the community is also fair. Could be difficult tax-wise though? IDK.

The most difficult thing might be to have all parties agree to what, exactly, would constitute a fair arrangement. Free software where nobody gets directly paid is one thing which is easy to understand, but if money gets involved, things tend to get ugly, and nothing destroys a budding community faster than bitter infighting.

Don't let the other commenter dissuade you. There are many successful open source AGPL projects that have CLAs which are not widely disparaged. There's no shame in owning your creation, nor is it immoral to ask contributors to assign their copyright to you. To each their own. Good luck!

If you're the sole copyright owner, you can offer as many different licenses as you want, and no copyleft license can interfere with that.

That's not how licensing works. If you write the software, you can release it under any license(s) you want. The license states the terms under which you'll let others use the software.

That's what I thought but wasn't sure. Thank you (and sibling comments) for your comment.

Yes, you can licence it however you want because you are the copyright holder. See mongodb. IANAL. Licences are to restrict those who do not hold copyright.

> Licences are to restrict those who do not hold copyright.

On the contrary, licenses gives permission to those who do not hold copyright. Without any license, only the copyright holder has any rights to copy or modify the work in any way (except for fair use). A license gives permissions to non-copyright holders to do things which would otherwise be illegal under copyright law. A license can never restrict what anyone would otherwise be allowed to do, since it is not a contract.

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