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Really interesting.

As someone who wants to monetize his side projects, I am not sure what I should do.

Should I make it 1) open source under permissive license (MIT)

2) open source under restrictive license (AGPL/SSPL)

3) source available and only permissive if you pay me a license (like how redis did it in the middle but actually this time , instead of changing license after project is already famous, I do it from the start of the project)

4) not make its source available and distribute a binary for fixed one time.

5) I do any of the above things but with primarily supporting saas? and supporting the ability to move out as you mentioned

Currently, most of my software that I write is just open sourced with MIT and I just private the software that I think has value.



I have similar questions - think open source funding is an important and unsolved problem.

Under an ideal economy and politics, we might use taxation to fund OpenSource projects that are in the public interest : just as we used tax to build road, rail, bridges, and other widely used shared infrastructure.

It would not be the end of competition or capitalism if we did this - similarly we should fund science and engineering research, and that could include funding development of OSS projects indirectly.

I know YC say they invest in business models built around open source, and open source can work as a marketing sales funnel toward paid SaaS premium features. It would be nice to have some analytics on what hybrid OSS/SaaS biz models work well in practice.


Absolutely. Do hit me up if you find it as there definitely needs a mix b/w the morality and money for software since open source to me is a moral standpoint and I want to find the right mix I guess.




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