Ask HN: Open-Source but Paid Software | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Open-Source but Paid Software

5 pointscodegeek8 comments

How would you go about creating and selling software that would be Open Source but paid. For example, you pay to get access to source code and then can pay for basic support/maintenance but you self host. What are some of the examples of this model ?

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Sidekiq in the Ruby on Rails community is a success. Sidekiq itself is free, but support and some enterprise features require a yearly subscription.

The author just posted a 10 year summary [0]:

> 1 employee (me!)

> 1850 customers

> 3.0m HTTP requests to the commercial gem server per day

> $13.5 million in total gross sales

It's a success in my book.

0: https://www.mikeperham.com/2022/01/17/happy-10th-birthday-si...

I am doing something like this with https://www.uxwizz.com

I think the big difference is that it's not really Open Source (you get the original server-side PHP+MySQL code, but only the bundled React+TypeScript UI).

The model is more similar to "old-school" software where you paid once and could use the problem, the only difference being that the backend code is easy to read/modify, and it's not a black box.

This used to be more common, especially in the video game industry. Pay for a piece of software like a physics engine or GUI library, get full C++ source code. Usually those companies had legal departments to chase down non-paying infringers though...

Sidenote: If you call it "open source" you'll definitely get a lot of hate from a vocal cadre who want "open source" to only apply to copyleft/BSD/MIT/etc. licenses. (I assume you're not using one of those licenses, because otherwise someone could just host your code as a free download).

You can sell your software but the open source license means that your customers can then freely publish the source code for anyone to see and use.

If you don't want that then you need a "source available" license, not an open source license.

Interesting. Is there a website that explains these types of licenses in detail ? Ideally it would be a self hosted web app but I don't mind sharing source code to address any security questions.

Almost all WordPress premium plugins.

Good point. Any web application examples ? I mean something that can be fully hosted by you as a web app.

I think GitLab somehow acts like this: they have a fully open source product, that you could host yourself for free, then you have a lot of extra functionality that works only for paying users. (tho I'm not sure how that works, if you have access to the code or not etc)

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