I've got a few open-source projects that I spent quite a bit of time on and which I'm about to release. Most of them try to make life easier for developers. I'm aware that this is a really crowded space, and the chances to find a way to make any money out of this are minuscule, esp. it all being open-source. I'm fine with that though.
I've settled on licensing the code (mostly, except for some low-level libraries) GPLv3. One thing I'd like to do is being able to dual-license the code in case somebody wants to use it in their own commercial projects, without having to adhere to the GPL.
This would be easy if I was the only contributor. For the (probably, but hopefully not) unlikely case I'm getting outside contributions/pull-requests this would make things more difficult though, I imagine.
How do people usually deal with this? Could I ask people to only create pull-requests/contributions with an attached permissive license (e.g. Apache) for the code in question? I know of metafizzy ( https://packery.metafizzy.co/license.html ), who seem to dual-/triple-license some of their projects. I'm not quite sure how they treat 3rd-party contributions though.
Any pointers for strategies/wording for all this?
Have you checked SideKiq story on IH podcast?
No, I haven't thanks! Do they talk about contribution licensing in the podcast?
From what I can see on their Github repo they use LGPL, and make money with separate 'pro' packages. This probably gets around the issue of having to worry about licensing contributions, as those would also be LGPL, which means they can be used without having to open up the source code for their 'pro' offering.
I don't intend, for now at least, to have 'extra' functionality for paid users, so this probably would not work for me. If at all, I'd just like to sell 'non-GPL' licenses to my code which would include 3rd party contributions, which in turn would have to be non-GPL, otherwise whoever buys from me still has to adhere to the GPL. Does that make sense?
I am the wrong person to ask about open source licenses. Sorry