this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
57 points (96.7% liked)

Open Source

31066 readers
567 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The same opensource app, downloadable on both stores but paid on playstore and free on fdroid. Is it legal and is it ethical? Why?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you own the copyright then yes this is 100% legal.

There are already apps that are like this. They usually add a couple features to the paid release so that people feel like they are getting something extra for the money. The good ones will eventually move those features to the open release eventually. However, this incentivizes keeping part of the app closed source so that nobody can just rename and re-release the paid version.

It is 100% up to you for how to handle these tradeoffs. Personally, I think so long as you are principled and ready for some criticism - and can handle it gracefully - getting paid for work that builds your open source app is a very good idea. We don't all have the luxury of maintaining high quality unpaid side projects!

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you don't own the copyright and its libre software, this is 100% legal too

[–] Undertaker@feddit.org -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No. It's not. Please take a look at different licenses in this area, whatever 'libre' means

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 2 points 1 month ago

Libre is a type of license that makes this legal. Eg GPL or CC SA