> Have you had any interest from others in seeing your commercial project unencumbered from legal restrictions?
I have, yes. But currently it's my only source of income, and I need to maintain said income, otherwise I will not have the resources to devote to development of the app (both the closed source parts and open source parts).
If I could make the same amount of money (or more) by open sourcing the entire app, I'd happily do it. I know that theoretically at least, there are strategies to do so, and actually I'd like to take this approach if I can find one that works. If you have any suggestions I'd certainly like to hear them (and yes I'm serious).
I'm a strong believer though in the "hybrid" approach, whereby parts of a product are open source (and used by other products), and other parts are kept proprietary. KHTML (now known as WebKit) is a perfect example of this. If it was GPL, there's no way Apple could have built Safari on it, and the project would have continued to struggle as it had been for some time and probably gone nowhere. But because it was under a license that allowed Apple (and later Google) to build a proprietary product on top of it, both companies had a strong incentive to take the library and improve it. Granted, it was LGPL (not Apache), so they were legally required to contribute their changes back to the community.
A proprietary product that brings in money that can, in part, be used to fund development of the open source components of an application is something I see as a good model. But certainly there are others that could be made to work.
I have, yes. But currently it's my only source of income, and I need to maintain said income, otherwise I will not have the resources to devote to development of the app (both the closed source parts and open source parts).
If I could make the same amount of money (or more) by open sourcing the entire app, I'd happily do it. I know that theoretically at least, there are strategies to do so, and actually I'd like to take this approach if I can find one that works. If you have any suggestions I'd certainly like to hear them (and yes I'm serious).
I'm a strong believer though in the "hybrid" approach, whereby parts of a product are open source (and used by other products), and other parts are kept proprietary. KHTML (now known as WebKit) is a perfect example of this. If it was GPL, there's no way Apple could have built Safari on it, and the project would have continued to struggle as it had been for some time and probably gone nowhere. But because it was under a license that allowed Apple (and later Google) to build a proprietary product on top of it, both companies had a strong incentive to take the library and improve it. Granted, it was LGPL (not Apache), so they were legally required to contribute their changes back to the community.
A proprietary product that brings in money that can, in part, be used to fund development of the open source components of an application is something I see as a good model. But certainly there are others that could be made to work.