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@derhuerst
Created May 13, 2020 13:33
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why I sell private licenses for my projects

Why I sell private licenses for my projects

Public transportation is a great thing, but stuck within the status quo. Help me making public transport more user-friendly, machine-readable and accessible.

Connecting public transport networks, for the benefit of everyone, is something that almost no company considers necessary. Right now, I'm in the priveleged position of being able to live off what I have earned at my previous job at Deutsche Bahn. Financial support will allow me to keep working on what I think is needed for passenger-friendly, accessible public transport services.

Read more about my motivation at my GitHub Sponsors profile.

Open source maintainers need income to fund their work.

Right now, the status quo is that maintainers create massive amounts of value and then for-profit companies and SaaS startups capture almost all of it.

Read more about the sustainability issues of the open source ecosystem in Recap of the funding experiment by Feross.

But neither Open Source licenses nor Open Source tooling tell you how or why to make time to write software in the first place. They don’t tell you how to stay sane, or pay rent, so that you can write still more, or maintain what you’ve already made. Even if there’s clear need.

License Zero is a new set of tools at your disposal. [...] License Zero evolves the most promising Open Source business model, the one most protective of good software craft: dual licensing, or offering software under one set of public terms, with an option to purchase other terms if you need them.

Read more about how License Zero intends to solve this problem in The License Zero Manifesto.

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