I wonder whether the author has considered taking the product to a paid level and what would be necessary for it.

Obviously, all contributors have some form of copyright, which may or may not have been waived depending on whether there was an ACL in place and jurisdiction. So he would need to get permission from the copyright holders, maybe in exchange for a percentage of the profit.

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j1elo 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Changing the license of already existing code? You might not be able to do that without permission from other contributors, I agree.

But it's MIT license. We can open a company tomorrow, take that code, and start selling it. Further development and improvements of the code could be trivially done openly or behind closed doors. FWIW the author themselves could do that if they wanted.

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pasc1878 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

ANd that gets rather looked on here as the authors being deceitful and not really Open Source doing a bait and switch.

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tracker1 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I've been working on a software package I'm hoping to release in a few months... I'm really torn on either split FLOSS with commercial extensions, or just going fully private... I was planning on a pretty generous free tier, but hoping to make a bit on the side from commercial customers.

It's a bit of a niche as it is, so that's going to be rough in any kind of pricing model, as a large part of that niche is either homebrew types and the other commercial industry that will likely require some more integrations and customization.

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bartread 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You could dual license as well, so it’s GPL or AGPL for personal, OSS, or academic use, but requires a paid for commercial license for commercial use.

I suggest GPL or AGPL because their copyleft clauses make them hostile towards platform providers who might otherwise seek to profit from your work without paying.

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j1elo 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Platform providers can take (A)GPL code as-is and totally profit from it without paying.

As long as they keep releasing sources of their own modifications -if they ever do any-, the rest is fair play.

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bartread 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yeah, but the copyleft makes anything they build around it a derivative work that they also have to release sources for - especially with AGPL. Most don’t want to do that because that’s where their IP lives.

Not all open source licenses are copyleft licenses (e.g., MIT very much isn’t), but at the very least copyleft licenses make it much harder to exploit open source code commercially without giving back in some way, whether that’s code, or cash for a commercial license.

Not perfect, by any means, but definitely an improvement over more permissive licenses.

I am aware of how much I’m starting to sound a bit like RMS in my old age.

	▲	j1elo 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I wholeheartedly agree. Licensing is a complex topic of which I've read a good deal, and even within the Open Source communities there are usually a lot of misconceptions, so I like chiming in with less commonly pointed but very practical effects of it all, in case it helps someone to learn a tiny bit that day. In this case the provider would of course have to comply with the AGPL and release their modifications as you mention, but it's important to note that No FOSS license protects at all against, for example, just offering the code as a service. It's the exact reason why Mongodb changed licenses and then a stream of commercial products started to change into "Source-Available" licenses in the recent past.

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tracker1 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

It would be dual license effectively... the base version AGPL and the Commercial version with additional functionality. Though I'd considered BSL and alternatives... and as mentioned, just closed/commercial only.