How to choose the right license for your OSS product?
OSS is a great and rewarding way for a startup to build a software product, grow your community and find early adopters.
However without endless cash reservoirs, at some point, the company needs to start generating revenue from its product.
The usual business models are SaaS, enterprise features, or support contracts.
This is where the fine line between true OSS and protecting the IP and indirectly the company's revenue begins.
So what's your opinion on the license and the philosophy behind it?
- Loose (Don't worry about it): For example MIT, BSD, and Apache
- Copyleft (Make sure whoever copies your stuff has to do open source as well): For example GPL, AGL, MPL
- Restricted (Focus on protecting your IP): For example BSL (MariaDB), Elastic License (Elastic), SSPL (MongoDB)
The right license ofc depends on the business model. However, the philosophies are generally applicable. Would love to hear your opinions!
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My personal preference is MIT when developing my own open source tools, as my own motivation and need spurs development.
However, if this was something that was akin to a product and thought that I could, in some way, monetise, I'd go MIT or GPL and do what a lot of people are doing now: let people self host for free or pay me a small amount per month so that you don't need to manage your own installation.
If you think about the cost of a server, plus the time taken to ensure that the product is up to date, the server is secured, and that there is adequate backups and availability, you can really justify throwing some money at someone to handle all of that for you.
This, to me, is the perfect approach and one that I'd like to do at some point. I'm looking at open sourcing parts of my tech stack (initially) but the code quality and documentation is just not there yet haha.
Thanks for your thoughts. Self-host for free seems reasonable if the product is offered as some form of SaaS. If the product is marked as a self-hosted solution would assume that customers are willing to pay for an enterprise license that facilitates the self-hosting process and offer support or would you restrict the self-hosting to non-commercial use via the license?
Support contracts were the ideal business plan for open source initially, with companies like RedHat paving the way. The idea definitely has precedence.
I think that there is a market for that but it'll really depend on the product itself, and whether it appeals to enterprise customers. I do know that businesses like to pay someone they can shout at when things go wrong, and they'll pay extra for that.