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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

The licensing is kind of strange. Self-hosted syncing is supposedly a paid feature, and there are indeed license checks in the code, but unlike your typical open core product with a separately licensed ee/ directory, this one including license checking code is entirely under AGPL, and FAQ specifically stresses “SiYuan is completely open source”. As such one can patch out the license check (literally a one line change if I’m not mistaken, I only scanned the code) and still completely license-compliant, and one can even distribute binaries of the patched out version, though that would be a major jerk move. So, is that intended? Only selling convenience of prebuilt images?

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My company does exactly this intentionally for everything we sell at our extension store. Everything under LGPL, license checks that you could bypass with not much effort.

It allows selling actually free software and can work well if you do this well.

Yeah I know this is a fairly well-trodden model recommended by FSF (okay, maybe I shouldn’t have called it kinda strange). I’m not confident it works out in most cases, though. So I’m wondering if it’s intentional in this case.

> I know this is a fairly well-trodden model

Actually, if you have other examples of this happening in the wild, I'd be quite interested.

The other widespread example I have in mind (which seems to work well) is WordPress extensions with premium features, but I've not encountered this too often neither.

Edit: thanks all for your examples :-)

The Ardour DAW is kinda like this. Downloads of prebuilt images through the website are paid, but you can download and build yourself from source. (Most Linux users probably have free access via distro package manager anyway.)

If I remember correctly, other examples of OSS code with premium addons and license check, on the top of my head: Bitwarden, Metabase, EmailEngine

I want to add a niche example. The famous Thunderbird addon owl for exchange (https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/owl-f...) where you can open the source of the addon and change the licence checks to always return true.

I believe making paid open source code to handle interoperability with something inherently closed / paid (if not outright expensive) is a good approach. Would be users are already used to pay for a related provider anyway, and it's not like the features are so useful without the functionalities of the other provider.

I know there are some open source Mac apps sold for a couple bucks but you can also build for yourself.

That said, I assumed it’s fairly well-trodden mostly because FSF for as long as I can remember approved/recommended something along the lines of selling builds but completely opening the source. I guess RHEL arguably falls into the camp as well, but they sell more than builds.

Ok, got it!

I believe the FSF points about selling software come from a time where you sold the medium (like floppy disks) with the software: you had to allow doing this because it was not practical to spread software without doing this and not costing (too much) to the author.

I don't really think it's practical advice for the present, they were never really business model specialists.

A very cool entertainment one (vs other good examples given so far) that got some nice attention on HN earlier this year [0] is the videogame Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Full GPL3, wonderful fun with a lot of great effort put in and very active ongoing development. You can hack away on it and compile it yourself, but then there are also convenience paid versions on the all the major platforms that seem to do reasonably well.

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0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39773641

You guessed it right, only CONVENIENCE of prebuilt images are sold, but due to Apple's developer account restrictions, it's actually better to use the official version if you don't want to spend $100 to build the ios version.

In addition, there are indeed two better-known, unofficial patches with paid restrictions removed, one is an experimental version by a third-party developer, which is submitted upstream after testing the functionality, at github.com/siyuan-community/siyuan, and the other is a patch that simply removes the paid functionality. It's at github.com/EightDoor/siyuan.

Also, there was actually a pr from a community developer to add digital certificates to ensure that unofficial packaged binaries wouldn't use the official cloud service, since the plugin bazaar uses the official cdn, which is actually not a small amount of traffic cost, but that pr was rejected.

> though that would be a major jerk move

Would it? If they don't want people to do it they could just use a proprietary license.

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