Does anyone know of a license where I can create my content for a client and keep the programming license for the code. I basically want to make it so once i sell the site to a client they can do whatever they want with it because they bought it but at the same time I can keep a copy for myself and resell it or build on it and sell it again or even sell that exact copy legally.
Anyone know of a license that allows me to do that.
I would expect you would want your customer to purchase a license to use your software in addition to purchasing your services.
You can probably achieve this in one or two sentences by including it on your original contract or terms of service document.
Use plain, simple language - you don’t need anything extraordinary to ‘license’ anything. A simple indication in the agreement will suffice.
In the US, unless you are working for hire/as an employee or specifically grant exclusivity in your contract, you don’t need to do much to allow you to reuse work.
But I agree that a line or two in your contract explaining this would be the ethical thing to do, just to avoid mis-communication.
Seems simple enough, but I would think it through a bit and write it up properly before entering it into your contract.
Based on your above statement that the client can do ‘whatever they want’ with the site they could reuse the site, sell it to others, or license it however they wish - maybe you should restrict and clarify that. You mentioned that you could keep a copy, resell it, etc. but will you grant an exclusive license to the client for custom graphics and other assets that are specific to that client?
A distinction between custom front-end and the codebase can be handy. It sounds like it won’t be hard to achieve what you are looking for.