# Hypothetical licensing question



## Zare (Jan 1, 2014)

Let's say I'm about to develop some software. It's free and open source.
However I'd like to make money on Windows/OSX users, eg. non open source OS users. In this scheme-of-things, those users should purchase a license.

I would absolutely avoid splitting the software in variants, eg. OSS one and proprietary one. 

The most effective solution I can think of would be to : freely distribute source and binaries, prohibit any derivative work, prohibit distribution by 3rd parties if the source/binaries have been modified. Something like "paid license" would exist. This would grant support for every target platform. It would also be mandatory for Windows/OSX users. In a nutshell, they could just go to the site, download binaries, or source, and build it, but they wouldn't have right to legally use, unless they have the license.  

General idea would be to compensate development costs while delivering freeware with source code access to OSS platforms. 

Is this possible? I mean this per-OS licensing thing. Can I say, you use FreeBSD, use my stuff freely, you use Windows, pay some money for it? Sure you can type anything into EULA. But, for example, EU says that EULAs must be compatible with consumer laws. In other words, if your EULA directive doesn't play with EU laws, you can wipe your butt with it.

Ideas, thoughts, potential caveats?
Thanks in advance and have a great new year 44.


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## Deleted member 9563 (Jan 1, 2014)

Zare said:
			
		

> I would absolutely avoid splitting the software in variants, eg. OSS one and proprietary one.



Why is that? It seems to me that would be the easiest and most effective way.


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## bestoronto (Jan 1, 2014)

I would guess that if there is a proprietary component to your offering, requiring some secret aspect of the service in question, it*'*s a slight chance you could charge for it and hope folks will ante up, and I would expect that if you were talking about a module, say, that would execute on a web client, which you built using free and open source tools, and be identical for either system then you would have a hard time extracting a fee for same. Unless said fee was optional aka 'shareware' model. Just my 2c.


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## neel (Jan 1, 2014)

I think a better way is that you make your software open source, and then ask for donations. And if you make certain types of software which is usually used by companies (e.g. server, embedded), you can sell support contracts for that software.

If you don't like the idea of open source, you can try having a free feature-reduced version and a paid-for full-featured version (not just for Linux/BSD, but for Windows/OSX also). You can also try advertisements but I don't really like that idea, since someone might just build an open source clone without ads and then take away your market share. Look at Opera. Back in 2002, Opera decided to make their web browser free with advertisements to try to counter the growth of Mozilla. Mozilla released Firefox in 2004 and Firefox started to become the web browser of the "cool" kids. Opera later decided to remove ads in 2005, but by then most people who wanted to leave Internet Explorer wanted to use Firefox instead of Opera, despite the fact that Opera was a more efficient web browser (then, now FF is more efficient than Opera). Google Chrome also became a competitor to IE and FF, but this is directly related to Google's dominance in the search engine market.


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## kpedersen (Jan 1, 2014)

Hmm, this is the exact same issue I am having for my project. I did not really come up with a good solution other than keep the source closed but release full versions for FreeBSD/OpenBSD for free but then provide demos and charge money for Windows/Mac/Android binaries.

As long as I release the source once I no longer monetize the project, then I feel that I am not being too evil.


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