How I made $300K from an open-source side project using dual licensing

paritydeals.com

Really interesting article and perspective for devs in the OSS world looking for greater financial stability. I’m curious, how do you strike a balance between dual licensing and building trust and adoption early on?

I built this project about 10 years ago just to learn JavaScript. For a long time, it was a completely free, and I lost interest in it after a while.

Later, when I quit my full time job to build my own startup, I needed something for survival. The first project I picked up again was lightGallery. It was already quite popular back then, so I decided to rewrite it from scratch and implement dual licensing.

So, basically the trust and adoption were built over years when it was free. The monetization came much later.

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