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It is really not that hard with the right licensing.

Offer your FOSS project with the meanest anti-corporation license you can find (AGPL?) which is not going to bother your user base but it is going to be a major hurdle for any corporation and then offer the software with a corporate friendly license for 100.000 / year.

Wouldn't this work?



You run into problems when there are contributors other than yourself.


Could you elaborate?


Ffmpeg’s code is owned by hundreds of people, you’d have to get them all to agree to relicense.


Not if you only change the license of the encompassing project, and leave the license of the sub-projects intact. Corporations are too addicted to plug-and-play software to be switching away to those sub-projects; also they'd lose the benefit of the maintenance (you could choose a new license once you maintain parts of the code).


So it is possible just hard.


Some are dead, the copyright will have passed on in their wills to next of kin.




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