Ask HN: How would you license your software?
We are a software startup. For us, not only pricing is the issue, but the licensing scenario. Overall, the mixture of pricing and different licensing options become a confusing problem. E.g. how much software rights, and for what price?
We have a piece of reasonably complex code that is in prototype-to-product/near product stage. This is an embedded software product.
Normally similar products are licensed by big firms with a royalty-based license. For example, many devices get mass-produced, the software vendor gets a share.
The problem is, this information is kept secret and I don't know how much they charge as royalties. Worse, being clueless about competitors, we might just lose a lot solely on imprecise pricing. Should we charge 300k? Should we charge 70K? Or 1M? 1M for a license might sound a lot, but all are valid possibilities that other firms are charging. Even if I am not going to charge 1M, it would be nice to know if someone else is charging, so that I know how much of a difference I am making to the customer.
Here's another licensing scenario: Whatif another software firm would like to take the software, make a derivation of it and re-license it themselves? Should I charge them a whole lot more? How would we license it in this case, i.e how much rights should we give them...
It takes a geek very naturally to write the good software, but when it comes to selling it, it seems we completely lose the grips.