What is dual licensing?
Dual licensing is a business model for creative work covered by copyright. In software, dual licensing means giving everyone free permission to use the software in some ways while selling permission to use it in others.
For example, a developer might allow noncommercial use of their software for free while charging for commercial use. Or they may allow use of their work in free, open projects while charing for use in closed, proprietary ones.
Dual licensing is sometimes called “selling exceptions”. The license terms for free use are “the rule”. Paid permissions to break that rule are the “exceptions”.
Who is dual licensing?
- Active Endpoints, Inc.: ActiveBPEL
- ActiveState
- Artifex: Ghostscript
- Coherent Graphics Ltd: Coherent PDF Command Line Tools
- Compiere: ERP
- drone.io
- DSSIM
- Duende Softwware: IndentityServer
- Element: Dendrite, Sydent, Sygnal, Synapse
- Entr'Ouvert: Lasso
- EPPlus
- Ettus Research
- FFTW: MIT
- FullPage.js
- Funambol
- GeoGebra
- Gifski
- Grafana
- Handsontable
- HashiCorp
- Highsoft: Highcharts
- Ian Lunn: sequence.js
- iText
- Jaspersoft
- JBIG-KIT
- JOOQ: Codegen, Meta, Runtime
- LexPredict: ContraxSuite
- Lightbend: Akka
- Magnolia CMS
- Mergely
- Metafizzy: Flickity, Isotope
- Metaways
- MinIO
- MobaTek: MobaXterm
- MongoDB
- Nmap Security Scanner
- Obsidian
- Odoo
- OPC Foundation: UA
- Oracle: Berkeley DB, MySQL
- Particular Software: NServiceBus
- Pixelglow Software: macstl
- pngquant
- RavenDB
- Redis: Redis, Redis Stack
- Sangoma: Asterisk
- Sangoma Technologies: Asterix
- ScientiaMobile: WURFL
- Sencha: EXT JS
- Sendmail, Inc.
- ServiceStack
- SQLite
- SugarCRM: Sugar
- Technical Pursuit: TIBET
- The Qt Company (formerly TrollTech AS): Qt
- tldraw
- University of California Santa Cruz: Genome Browser
- University of Washington: Rosetta
- VideoLAN: x264
- ZenOSS
- ZeroC: Ice
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