To Open Source or Not to Open

[5TonsOfFlax]

That is the question. Whether 'tis better to have a nobler spirit, or outrageous fortune.

Enough slaughtering the bard.

I have just reached a point in my current pet project where things are working rather well, and I am excited about showing it off to the world soon. I've implemented decently fast object detection (faces, cars, what-have-you) in AS3, and I would not be surprised to find that this ability would be highly desired by flash developers everywhere.

The thing is, I know the code can be better/faster, and I'd love to let some of the optimization gurus tune things up. I'd also love to turn a profit.

I was thinking of some sort of license which would be free for non-commercial use, but pay for commercial use. Does anyone know a license that allows both goals, AND actually opens the source to be improved by others?

Also, if you'd like to comment on the usefulness of the project, feel free. I plan on doing a bit more tuning, then posting a big ol' demo perhaps in a week.

[nortago]

I'm in that position too, and would love to know if there is a license out there like that?

Looking forward to what you got though!

[5TonsOfFlax]

None of the licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative have the dichotomy between commercial and non-commercial. However, Creative Commons does have a license-choosing tool which allows this sort of thing. You may find it useful:
http://creativecommons.org/license/

After the underwhelming response I got here, I decided that turning a profit on it was far-fetched anyway, so I released under the MIT license. My project is now up on google code, if anyone cares.

http://code.google.com/p/deface