On Friday, February 5, 2016 at 3:10:54 PM UTC, Scott Jones wrote:
>
> I'm curious about how one could release packages for use with Julia such
> that they would be free for non-commercial use (under GPL maybe?) but also
> available with a paid license for commercial use.
>
I guess you know, it's just not completely clear: You can't release under
GPL and, say only non-commercial is only ok (neither can you with any
permissive/OSI certified license or DFSG-compliant that inspired OSI/it's
based on).
Effectively, even if GPL allows commercial use, you might be putting off
many of your competitors, by using it, because of it "viral" (or
"spider-plant"-nature). Since/when you own the copyright you can release
under any other (proprietary) license forcing to pay, for using and getting
out of the viral nature.
One thing the GPL (or any license? at least free/open source) doesn't
forbid (and it's not like it's easy to know anyway), is using privately
within you whole organization/company. Then you can link with whatever
other software (just not distribute/convey outside).
One even stricter license, might help you, AGPL based on the GPLv3. Then
you force your competitor to release code, if the code to any user of a
server you have ("software as a service").
https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html
https://www.debian.org/social_contract
https://opensource.org/licenses
Has anybody else done this?
>
> As much as possible, I'd like to release things under the MIT license,
> however, there are many things that might be useful to other Julians, that
> they (the company I'm consulting for) don't want to give away for free to a
> commercial competitor (we need to eat also!).
>
>
>
