I’m currently re-evaluating my startup company’s open source licensing strategy. We’re currently the only contributor to our projects (yet) so we have some freedom to change I believe.

TLDR: is LGPL for core libraries and AGPL+dual licensing (on request) for client applications a sensible strategy? Is dual licensing sustainable or a big no-no?

We have a domain specific language with a fully fledged compiler for which we would like to make (other product/external/corporate/proprietary) adoption easy but have this core and changes to it remain open: sounds like LGPL might fit the bill for the core library work? Any other license candidates? We want to promote open sourcing any extensions or integrations of the language as well but regular GPL and dual (paid) licensing seems a bridge too far to encourage adoption in other products.

We also maintain our own analysis and visualization (VS Code) extensions and client apps/libs that build on these core libraries, but I’m a bit more hesitant here. There’s so much time invested in all this that we do not want this to be “up for grabs” without sharing alike so we’re thinking of GPL or even AGPL here, but consider a dual licensing clause to redeem some development hours if corporate parties want to incorporate our stuff in their proprietary product.