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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 :-)

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.

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

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.

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

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