You can always license out your software to those people under a special license for them. Which might include a fee or any other conditions. Just that your software has one open source license doesn’t mean you can’t distribute it with other licenses as well. Things might get complicated if you have other contributors though.

Theres a small issue that you overlooked here which is that once it has contributions from several other people, anything AFPL becomes impossible to relicense, how do you get 6 random GitHub users to sign a contract, without robust copyright assignment/management mechanisms ahead of the very first outside contributor, AGPL effectively kills the ability for anyone too pay you for your own work on terms you might want to agree to.

By using aggressive open source licenses like AGPLv3 you have to do more work to keep the door open for yourself to profit later if you so choose, it’s a bad personal economic choice, and while some view it as the ultimate in altruism to prevent this, it’s also an act of denial, everyone who could have used it inside companies or projects that can’t change their license to be compatible are denied the ability to use the code.

Nothing says you have to accept outside contributions. Signal rewrites outside pull requests for this very reason.

Also hot damn, the AFPL license is super aggressive, makes AGPLv3 look downright business friendly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_Free_Public_License

> Signal rewrites outside pull requests for this very reason.

Too bad that rewriting something doesn't transfer copyright :D

Might mean to reimplement from scratch without looking at the would-have-been contributed code.

Ideas aren't copyrightable. IANAL

Eh I've just put a contributing file where to contribute you must accept the software might go under lgpl and future versions of gpl/lgpl might be adopted.

That's it. I have no plans for using anything more liberal than lgpl ever.

Yes for libraries I can consider doing LGPL for some companies.

> Things might get complicated if you have other contributors though.

Not really… they distribute under whatever license they got it from.

I've also started moving from good old GPL to AGPL, good idea about putting "don't ask about relicensing" in your COC, I think I'll start doing that as well.

I've been seeing this trend pop up more and more (so I wrote about it[0]), glad to see more people talking about it openly:

[0]: https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...

As an OSS developer, I will also avoid GPLed code unless I am only using it as something to be consumed (such as emacs when I get the decade itch to remind myself why I don’t use it). I write the libraries that I write to be given away and for my joy.

I write libraries that don't help companies walk all over users and deprive them of freedom :P