Selling licenses is standard. The only reason I haven't promoted this
model yet is because I prefer to focus on empowering member
orgs/individuals to have income sources. Selling licenses can vest a lot
of power in the copyright holders, which can lead to resentment and
corruption (which I've seen happen on OSS projects).

On 05/25/2014 03:50 PM, Peter Todd wrote:
> On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 03:38:35PM +0200, Wladimir wrote:
>> Foremost I like their goal of making it easier for people to start
>> working on bitcoin applications, but then they quote something like
>>
>> “I felt like I’d enter the weekend with a really great idea [for an
>> application] but I’d spend three weekends just trying to get these
>> [bitcoin] nodes running in a way that was useful for my application.”
>>
>> It's really too bad they're investing all that money in builiding yet
>> another in-the-cloud service, instead of in making the P2P tools
>> easier to use in the first place.
>>
>> All - I guess? - because they need to build toll gates and 'own'
>> infrastructure to monetize on it. Which in turn creates structural
>> risk because everyone will rely on their information and servers. I
>> think people will eventually realize that the old way just doesn't
>> work here anymore.
>
> You know, ironically the even older old way - selling licenses for
> proprietary software - is probably preferable to having all your funds
> and service tied to servers in the "cloud". At least with proprietary
> software you control the uptime and reliability, and nothing stops the
> vendor from selling licenses to proprietary software whose sourcecode is
> publicly available either - businesses tend to follow licensing
> practices honestly due to the high cost of getting caught.
>
> Heck, that could be a hilarious business model for libbitcoin: AGPL with
> no linking exemptions, but if you don't want to make your services
> sourcecode public you can buy a license from unsystem.
>
>
>
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