Say a company wants to keep development of new features of a piece of software i

Question

Say a company wants to keep development of new features of a piece of software internal, but wants to make the source code for previous versions public, up to and including existing public features, so that other people can benefit from using and modifying the software themselves, and even possibly contribute changes that can be applied to the development branch.

Is there a term for this sort of arrangement, and what is the best way of accomplishing it using existing version control tools and platforms?

Explanation / Answer

I don't know the name but for implementation following setup might work:

Create two repos on github (replace with any other platform doing the same), one public, one private. Keep latest version X in private one, and v.X-1 on public one. When releasing new version, update public one from private one. This way you will be able to easily use version control, and also allow users of public repo send you their contributions via pull requests, and then be able to merge it to you private repo, submit issues, etc. This also will give you the options to allow paid users to do the same for your private code - give them either read-only or even read-write access.

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