It isn't, because as long as the price for a direct license is reasonable, companies will pay it just to have the paperwork.

SQLite is public domain, and makes money by selling "licenses" to such companies (they're called something else, but it allows the company buying it to file it in their "licenses" folder and tick a checkbox; https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html).

That doesn't make this license not stupid. Sure, SQLite sells licenses, there's nothing wrong with that, ImageSharp is welcome to do it too! But you'll notice that SQLite doesn't have a license like this one...

SQLite is also the most widely used open source library, or close to it, in the entire world. They can get by with a miniscule portion of one percent of users paying for a license.

If the intent is for it to be Apache 2.0 with a completely optional paid license, you can just do that without a convoluted licensing scheme.

That is exactly what they did originally, and it did not produce enough paid customers.

That's unfortunate, but will the license change actually solve that? Are a lot of companies going to pay an annual license for a .NET image library?

In the longer term, I'm guessing this pushes everyone pretty strongly towards SkiaSharp instead.

I think they make most of their money from the support contracts they sell, if I recall correctly. I think nearly every major company has one for instance and they’re pretty pricey

if it's a library the classic model is to distribute it under the GPL and have a separate proprietary license that you charge for

(doesn't stop mega-corps using it as a cloud service/internally though)

I think dual licensing AGPLv3 (or above) is the simplest approach. Include a separate paid (preferably straightforward) license and be done. Make it easy for people to pay you and make it easier to get refunds for any reason.

Another option is to do what Duende did. I think Duende (Identity Server) handled the situation pretty well.

https://duendesoftware.com/products/identityserver

> Standard License Pricing > Free for development, testing and personal projects—only pay for production. Try it now! Learn about our free Community Edition.

> Our Community Edition license is feature equivalent to our Enterprise Edition, but only includes standard support.

> Community Edition allows hosting IdentityServer on your own infrastructure (including your cloud). It is not for scenarios where you redistribute IdentityServer, or build software for third parties. In this case you either need a redistribution license, or the end-customer needs a standard license.

> For-profit companies/individuals with less than 1M USD annual gross revenue > Non-profit organization with a published annual budget less than 1M USD > Registered charities

You'll note that Duende correctly does not call their model open source. Is source available a step up from fully closed source? Sure. But it's not the same as open source. So if your goal is to promote open source, I don't see why you would work with a product such as Duende, or ImageSharp if they hypothetically followed this example.