Because commercial software companies never die (and take their IP down with them)? And are you seriously advocating that a lack of knowledge about a factor you have identified as being important (most commercial companies rarely tell you how many developers account for the majority of the code changes) is somehow beneficial to you, compared to actually knowing?
> Because commercial software companies never die.
I wasn't clear. I wasn't comparing to commercial companies. I basically don't use commercial software because I'd rather have to code features myself than depend on somebody for documentation. Depending on someone for documentation (ie. having to reverse engineer something you paid for!) is one of the worst feelings in the world. Commercial open source is the best of both worlds for project that require a lot of domain knowledge from developers (eg. the highest-end knowledge of browser compatibility issues, which is required to build a contenteditable rich text editor). You may not agree, but my perspective is that in the open source world, the reality is that the primary developer is the difference between the project existing and not existing. You can just ignore that and not compensate that person with anything but good vibes, but then you'll find that the project no longer exists.
Okay, I can see what you're getting at. I'm still not convinced that this move is the right way to go about it, as compared to simply keeping an FOSS license and setting up consultancy payments or similar (as they had previously) - as others point out, the commercial licenses can be a serious pain to navigate in many companies, that can significantly reduce the benefit your product offers.
Which FOSS license? Because if it's a permissive one, like MIT, BSD or MPL, then you get results like we did with CKEditor 4:
> From these thousands of businesses and millions of downloads, a very small group (less than 0,5%) decides to enter into business relations with CKSource.
CKEditor (a rich-text editor) is this kind of really complex piece of software which requires years of experience and years of development. It's also a piece of software which is complex enough to scare people from contributing to it. So people use it for free and report bugs to you. That's all. With that conversion rate about 0.5% and a rather niche market, it's possible to slowly grow your business (as we did – CKSource is 40+ people today), but hard to keep up with the world.
Just to give a context – CKEditor 5 (which was written completely from scratch) required 5+ experienced developers working for more than 4 years right now. Therefore, for CKEditor 5 we chose GPL2+. We hope to have a more healthy paying/free users ratio. The future will show us if that's a good direction
BTW, you say that:
> commercial licenses can be a serious pain to navigate in many companies
From my experience, it's actually the opposite. Companies like our commercial license because it's easier for them than going with e.g. LGPL or MPL and hoping they won't violate it.
I agree completely - there are FOSS licenses that are easier to make money with than others. One of the most frustrating things I regularly encounter on HN is the “MIT/BSD is best, don’t use anything else” mentality. I think some of that is likely coming from the ease of use commercially (I worked for organisation who’s legal department literally said MIT/BSD = green, GPL2 = yellow, others = red).
But as you have yourself pointed out, it is (or at least may be) possible to make money as a commercial entity whilst still using a FOSS license, without entering the netherworld of “what is commercial use” arguments that these bespoke licenses create.
P.S. I know CKEditor very well, having used its predecessor FCKEditor on a small website for a local charity over 15 years ago! So thank you for continuing to support FOSS :)
Yeah, I definitely don't know much about the side you're describing, wherein a company has pains with commercial licenses. I thought companies want either a "clean" FOSS license /or/ a commercial license. What's the difference between buying OSX/Windows for your business and buying commercial OSS?
Personally, I'd rather get an open source commercial product that I can read the source and contribute back to (which means yes, I would be giving those contributions back for free, that's part of the deal), than having to deal with having either no source code, or code and consultants, which is also fraught with challenges.
It is scary you can't fork a commercial OSS project, but if the company dies they usually make the software free.
Remember, this is web front end stuff. No one is going to use the same components twice, and if someone says something has to be fixed, a new team of developers and a complete rewrite is to be expected.
