Making money from an dual licensed, open source project
Hi! (first post!)
I am writing an unique and powerful filesystem product called SuperTag. It allows for an unparalleled level of organization by changing the nature of files and directories. I would like it to be dual licensed as open source for a basic version as well as proprietary license for a full version, and I believe I have the logistics of it worked out (correct licenses, OS contributor license agreements, etc).
My motivation for dual licensing is that I like to share my tools with the community, even those that can't/don't pay for software, but who also don't mind being on the bleeding edge (primarily the Linux community). I also believe in the "free advertising" potential of OSS. However, I also want to make money by offering something simple and full-featured to those who want it (primarily the MacOS community).
Has anyone tried something similar and learned any lessons? I would like to go into this with my eyes as open as possible. Did you find that going open source was a big mistake? Do you regret not going open source with a version of your product? Any pitfalls you can foresee?
I also have a oss project and building a commercial version of it. Still working on the commercial version so don't have much insight yet but there is benefit of your project being open source. When its open source there will be lots of brain behind the product and you'll find lot's of idea and help from the community.
I agree. How are you handling contributor license agreements (CLA)? Did you get contributors to sign off already or do plan on asking them to retroactively sign? (Django did a retroactive signing, for example).
at this point not worried about CLA, its way too early to worry about this rn.
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Yeap, sounds totally possible!
I was offering fullPage.js totally free for about 3 years before I started creating payed add-ons on top of it. (https://alvarotrigo.com/fullPage/)
Now It's my full time job making more than 15K/month.
Another example going to the next level, would be https://tailwindcss.com and https://tailwindui.com/ which is a predefined set of components made with the free open source component. They made more than 500K on the first 3 days selling it!
@adamwathan can tell you much more about it :)
Cool idea! My suggestion would be to first release the open source version, get traction and slowly start creating a community around it. A couple of months later, you could release the paid version. The main reason for this would be to establish a loyal audience first, which will help catapult the paid product launch.
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