How do you handle licensing and revenue leaks for self-hosted software?

Question

I&rsquo;ve been exploring the hidden costs of self-hosted software, specifically, the silent revenue leaks that come from unauthorized deployments, lingering trials, and unmonitored usage.Most devs I spoke to shared stories of enterprise clients spinning up &ldquo;temporary&rdquo; instances that ran for months, or trials that never actually ended. If you&rsquo;re selling self-hosted, how are you tackling this?I wrote up my findings and what can be done about it here:https://kagehq.com/blog/hidden-revenue-leak-self-hosted-softwareWould love to hear how the HN community is handling this.

josephcsible · Accepted Answer

By making the software FOSS and charging for support instead of usage. Definitely not with DRM that could leave you legally liable for disrupting a company's entire operations when an inevitable false positive happens.

hadaoaxb · Answer

We should license as CC-BY-cy-4.0. it clearly mentions that they cant commercialize. Btw, when they self host, they cant access your source code, right? unless you opensource your code?