awesome-oss-monetization

Monetization via Paid Commercial Use

AKA: Dual-Licensing, Multi-Licensing, Hybrid licensing,Resticted License, Proprietary Licences, License Exceptions

Different licenses forcing commercial users to pay a license fee to the open source project. Enables recurring payments often with support guarantees or SLAs.

Requires:

• Setup of a payment mechanism (hosted or self-build)
• Setup of a license for commercial-use
• Probably a legal entity needs to be founded to receive the payments
• Recurring “observation activites” to check if the OSS is in use by companies not paying

Variants & Options:

• Dual License: Single license for entities with a commercial use of the OSS
• Multi License: Different licenses for startups, freelancer, companies, universities, etc.

Platforms

• Fareness.dev (programmatic payment checking system based on licences)
• None required?: Only one codebase and commercial users directly pay to OSS project’s bank account

Evaluation

Characteristics	Value	Note
Effort to set-up	Weeks	Creation of a commercial license and legal documents
Effort to maintain	Low	Maybe reminders that commercial use is needed
Cost to set-up	Medium	Will require a lawyer to setup the license and contracts
Cost to maintain	Low	Will cause costs for legal or tax related stuff (but should be covered by income)
One-time Income	High	Few companies might pay large amounts if the OSS is essential
Recurring Income	High	License can enforce recurring payments per month or year
Income Predictability	High	Companies probably need OSS for several years
Full income Threshold	10+
Recipient	C
Additional Work	Medium	Will cause communication and SLA related work
Visibility	Medium	Easy to overlook but should stand out in a tech due dilligence
Necessity to pay	High	However, companies might look for other solutions
Entry Threshold	Medium	Individual contracts between every OSS and company might be necessary
Countervalue	None	Legal commercial use
Scalability	Medium	Scales with the number of commercial users (who must pay)
Effort for marketing	Low
Competitors	O	Depends on the original OSS licence: other companies could fork and develop it further with a proprietary license.
Software types	Special	Best for libraries or programs companies build tools upon

NOTE: A CLA (Contributor License Agreement) may be required to accept code contributions from third parties to the source code while retaining the ability to dual-license those contributions under the proprietary license.

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