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You can and this is indeed a good business model. This is what QT used in the earler times. The one thing you are limiting though, is to get patches from the users community. They would have to explicitly grant you the license to use them in a non-gpl way. So if you want a lot of development happen outside your own, this is a big challenge.


If you're hosting on GitHub you can use CLA Assistant [0] to have contributors read and sign a Contributor License Agreement from their pull request.

[0]: https://github.com/cla-assistant/cla-assistant


The question is, how many people are willing to sign a license agreement to contribute patches so that a software can be sold as closed source?




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