Question on Licensing

[granadacoder]

Hi.

On the nuget package page

https://www.nuget.org/packages/ObjectDumper.NET/

the link for "License Info" takes you to : http://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0

and links to that:

_Can Open Source software be used for commercial purposes?
Absolutely. All Open Source software can be used for commercial purpose; the Open Source Definition guarantees this. You can even sell Open Source software.

However, note that commercial is not the same as proprietary. If you receive software under an Open Source license, you can always use that software for commercial purposes, but that doesn't always mean you can place further restrictions on people who receive the software from you.

Can I call my program "Open Source" even if I don't use an approved license?
Please don't do that. If you call it "Open Source" without using an approved license, you will confuse people. This is not merely a theoretical concern — we have seen this confusion happen in the past, and it's part of the reason we have a formal license approval process. See also our page on license proliferation for why this is a problem._

............

However, on the main github repository page:

https://github.com/thomasgalliker/ObjectDumper

It says:

Free for non-commercial use. For commercial use please contact the author.

........

This seems like a discrepancy.

Can this software be using freely as open-source in commercial products ("as-is" is my intention here, not trying to enhance it or anything).

Thank you.

[thomasgalliker]

Thanks for your statements, @granadacoder. Let‘s just be clear:

• It costs a lot of effort to develop and maintain this package.
• People can use it free of charge if they don‘t use it in commercial products.

Question: If the package is used in a commercial product why should I not get compensated for at least a part of the original development cost? I‘m a professional software developer and software is my income.

[thomasgalliker]

Your proposal @granadacoder? How would you handle such a license situation? We can discuss it on linkedin. Feel free to connect: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/thomasgalliker

[JaredPhelps]

I don't think @granadacoder's question was questioning whether or not you deserve to be compensated for your work, it's more that the nuget package says this is licensed under the Apache license, which contradicts the "For commercial use please contact the author" stipulation at the end of the readme. So people that just grab the nuget package and take a quick look at the readme examples may unintentionally violate your intended license. I wouldn't have noticed the non-commercial stipulation if not for this question.

Googling around, it sounds like a common way to tackle this is to dual license your project under a very strict open source license and also offer a commercial license, but I am far from an expert here.