[cc-community] [cc-licenses] open source non commercial license

Evan Prodromou evan at prodromou.name
Thu Feb 8 22:44:29 EST 2007


On Mon, 2007-05-02 at 18:47 +0000, Emerson Clarke wrote:

> How do you avoid the situation where no one will use your library for
> risk of their project becoming a clutter of licensing restrictions and
> yet, as an individual, still make money from software ?

There are about a million ways to make money from producing free
software.

      * Offer consulting for installation and configuration
      * User training and documentation
      * Write and sell a book
      * Custom extensions, plugins, or etc. for particular uses
      * Ask for donations
      * Offer a commercial license with no source-code redistribution
        requirement for derivatives
      * Sell the media (installation CDs or DVDs)
      * Sell schwag with the logo on it
      * Apply for government or foundation grants
      * Provide software as a service (Web service, other service)

None of them are quite so easy as selling licenses for software, but
they all benefit immensely from broad distribution of Free Software.

Probably the biggest motivation to release a work as Free Software is
this: if you don't, someone else will release a program that's
equivalent and IS Free Software, and then your proprietary software
sales plummet. The Free economy favours those who give their stuff away
soonest.

-Evan


________________________________________________________________________
Evan Prodromou <evan at prodromou.name>
http://evan.prodromou.name/
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