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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

There is a pretty reliable way to do this. Which is to distribute the code under two licenses, where one of them is the AGPL and the other is a paid license.

AGPL allows you to satisfy the free software people (and the free-as-in-beer people) and correspondingly win market share and get code contributions etc., but it also scares a lot of large corporations (whether or not it should). And if their in-house bureaucrats won't let them license code under the AGPL but they still want to use it then it leaves them to pay you for the other license. Meanwhile the bureaucratic corporations are the ones with the resources to pay you anyway.

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Accepting contributions when you do this is a bit weird. They need to sign away their rights to their code so you can sell it. This is why the “open-source” database companies (all of which dual-license) don’t accept contributions.

> They need to sign away their rights to their code so you can sell it.

They can't accept contributions under the AGPL, but what stops them from accepting contributions under e.g. the BSD license? Does the BSD code stop Apple from selling macOS?

BSD/MIT are functionally equivalent to “sign away your rights.”

There is a meaningful difference between allowing someone to use your code for whatever and assigning the rights to it so that you can no longer use it.

And requiring contributions under BSD/MIT doesn't seem to be a huge problem for the projects that actually use those licenses.

The bigger problem they have is that nobody uses e.g. FreeBSD because if they do anything interesting the code just ends up in Linux/macOS/Windows whereas the reverse doesn't happen.

Please don't believe that this strategy is "reliable" in any way to get paid, if you or your company need that money for survival. FOSS and especially (A)GPL is just about forcing the balance to put more power in end user's hands, nothing else. A Proprietary+AGPL license combo might get you some cash from business wanting to change the code, but it will still allow any Amazon out there to host your code for free as part of their service catalog, while you are left to go out of business.

> it will still allow any Amazon out there to host your code for free as part of their service catalog, while you are left to go out of business.

Most other licenses allow them to do that without even contributing back improvements, since they're running the software but not distributing it.

Moreover, what is your business supposed to be? When you're selling support contracts or getting paid to make specific improvements to the code, what difference does it even make that some customers are running the software on AWS rather than their own local hardware?

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