Which opensource license to use to retain commercial rights for myself.

Question

I am starting an opensource project. I want to allow the following: Free for noncommercial use, bins and source mods, like with the GPL, but I would like to retain commercial rights for myself, and provide another license for commercial use for customers who prefer that option.

The number of licensing options seem a bit overwhelming. So my question is:

• Which opensource license should I use?
• Which commercial license should I use, if there are any standard ones
  available? Or should I come up with
  my own one here?

Answer 1

There is no problem with dual-licensing. GPL is fine for the noncommercial variant, and is widely accepted.

With the commercial one, I do not know of any standard ones. I would recommend you write one, that really suits your needs.

There is Hanselminutes Podcast on licenses here: Open Source Software Licensing with Jonathan Zuck of ACT Online. Towards the end they talk about the dual licensing of the MySQL database.

Answer 2

You could use dual-licensing. GPL license for non commericial use and You need to write a one for commericial use. Many products have similar kind of licensing. Check out the sample licensing agreement for Perforce, which is free for open source organization. http://www.perforce.com/perforce/price.html.

Answer 3

No open source license (as defined by the Open Source Initiative) will forbid commercial use of software. You can use a version of the GPL to disallow taking your software proprietary; companies could still use it internally, or distribute it for their own purposes, but they couldn't package it up and sell it as normal shrinkwrap software. Don't use a license like Boost or BSD, as they allow unlimited commercial usage with no restrictions.

You should decide what commercial use you want to allow, and that will depend heavily on the software and what people might want to use it for.