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Comment by Eliah_Lakhin | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for your feedback!

I agree with your point about the licensing. I would also add that tools for the development of compiler front-ends are quite a niche market. So, honestly speaking, I don't plan to earn much from my project regardless of the license terms. This work is part of a higher-level in-progress toolset, which is closer to the end users. I have dedicated it as a separate project primarily for public preview, with some restrictions on distribution and use, as I haven't decided on the overall toolset distribution model yet. But it is possible that I will change the licensing terms of Lady Deirdre in the future to something less restrictive (maybe even MIT) to make it more popular, this is just not my current goal. I apologize for any inconvenience my current licensing terms may cause.

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> I apologize for any inconvenience my current licensing terms may cause.

Friendly advice from a stranger, worth what it costs: I believe the greatest inconvenience of a commercial license will be to _you_, as opposed to end-users.

The market is so saturated with open source, developers expect it, and commercial licenses cause huge usage friction and doubt.

The "dual license" died as a viable business model around the time Meta (née Facebook) and Microsoft starting investing billions into free-as-in-beer OSS, 10-15 years ago.

Today, this model will only sabotage usage. People using your OSS is good. Even if your goal isn't to become popular, usage & feedback are learning, and while it's fine for popularity not to be a goal, I would encourage you not to proactively target the opposite of popularity.

If you have some other IP (the other tech you're describing) that can remain proprietary or wrapped behind a service, then people using other pieces of your stack for free is a _really good thing._ At least, they're aware of your brand and have started to trust it. At best, they're ready to use your commercial offering out of the gate.

You could however offer a cloud based static analysis API for security companies, which could be a viable source of revenue to fund the development.

IANAL/IANYL. Make it dual-licensed, AGPL with MIT by request. Indicate that you are presently declining MIT license requests. The chances of your agreement being adhered to are near zero, regardless of the legality. On the other hand, any mention of GPL will send lawyers running for the hills - AGPL more-so (and legally so, it makes your code basically useless to a corp). The MIT carveout is merely there so that contributors don't throw a fit if you choose a more permissive license down the line.

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