What is the best method for releasing free “extension” or example code based on a closed source proprietary project?

Question

I have a proprietary project. It's a simple authentication library. I want to write open source(BSD) extension/examples for it. These examples interface code, connecting my authentication library to a database containing users. I'm providing examples which people hardly ever use out of the box, but are excellent starting points for tying it into their own database.

I want to be able to release these extensions separately from the library. What is the best way of to this?

My idea is to use a free github project and put the extensions there as well as the demo version of my authentication library(ie, just the assembly). How would I manage different versions of the authentication library though?

At the moment, I use SVN for managing the source code of the authentication library, though I like git as well, so would switch if that'd be better.

Does anyone know of a good way of managing this kind of thing?

Answer 1

Managing two different versions is probably going to be extremely messy. Try to cleanly separate the stuff you wish to open source from the stuff you wish to keep proprietary. Will the open source stuff be able to stand on their own? Since your talking about extensions to a library they are probably separated anyway.

You're proprietary code is going to be the first user of your open source code so licence your open source code under a licence that permits proprietary use.

If you are more familiar with svn than git, then you could host your code in google code, they provide svn repos. But that's only to ease your transition and not add extra bumps in the way. If you are familiar with git go with github, apart from the hype they do provide an excellent service.