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Comment by otrahuevada | Hacker News Reader

A good compromise for this kinds of things is usually dual licensing:

    - If you're big enough to make real money and you need my attention then pay me this much please 
    - If you're some rando with a toy project, then we have a github issue tracker

A project this size and age should always have a lawyer at hand just in case, and they should be able to walk the maintainers through the process of dual-licensing everything.

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What you suggest is not really dual licensing though. It's a source-available license with a free tier.

Dual licensing means that there are two licenses that the user can choose from at their discretion. This is why GPL may work together with a commercial license but not MIT, as businesses have reasons to avoid GPL.

It sounds like otrahuevada is describing the same thing, doesnt it? Choose a commercial license if you want support, or the open source license if you don’t. That is how I understood it.

What otrahuevada is describing is a situation in which the software developer determines under what terms a particular user may use the software, not a situation where the user makes this choice. Only the latter situation is (can be) dual licensing. The difference may seem subtle, but it's actually huge.

There was a discussion about this with someone else just yesterday. I'll find the link.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29871302#29873586

I understood the parent post to suggest dual licensing where the commercial license also gives you paid support. I.e. if you expect support pay up by buying a commercial license. Though I see no reason to conflate the two things. I would suggest in this case not even having a public issue tracker, and make your open source offering a take it or leave it proposition.

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