How Do You Fund an OpenSource Project?

Stuart Herbert asks: "I maintain Generic NQS, a successful, and long-standing, GPL'd project. I'd love to be able to work on this project (or perhaps other GPL'd stuff) as the day job (who wouldn't? ;-) but to do that I need to find funding from somewhere. I'm wondering how many Slashdot readers have been successful in achieving this holy grail without having to setup a company themselves to sell the product, and how they did it. "

Comments

Re:Dual License -- is this legal?

[Dicky]

This is entirely legal. If you write some code, you can release it under whatever license(s) you want. You are free to release it under the GPL and sell it under a more traditional license at the same time, on the basis that people who don't (or can't) accept the terms of the GPL can buy their way out of it. The problem with this comes when there is more than one author for a program - i.e. any program which has user-submitted patches or enhancements. In that case, you would either need permission from every contributor, or you would need to get them to assign their copyright on their code to you when they submit it, so you can later sell it.

As it happens, there is an article at Byte on exactly this issue at the moment. I don't agree with everything in the article, but it is worth a read.