What is the best license to leverage some open source frameworks and projects?
Greetings IH,
For someone starting their own SaaS but looking to leverage some open source frameworks and projects, what is the best license?
For example, if someone wanted to use Spectrum (https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum) as their base for an online community but slap a paywall on it, would it even be legal or possible? Do people do this, or does everything simply start from scratch?
The way I look at licenses, if you want to be able to say that Fortune 500 companies are using your project to make money and don't care what happens to the project if anything happens to you, then you probably want something in the BSD/MIT/Apache space. The license is only a grant, with no obligation on the part of the user, so larger companies with legal teams will generally accept it without question.
However, if you want your project to be "open" as long as somebody is using it and aren't worried about scaring big companies away, then you probably want something more on the GPL/MPL side of things.
And if you want to make a political statement about the evils of copyright and privately-owned property, then you probably want to use CC0 as a public domain grant.
None of them have anything to do with being allowed to make money (though a handful of licenses include non-commercial or other ethical clauses), but GPL will often feel that way to companies accustomed to having a monopoly on what they sell.
I know under MIT you can use the code for commercial use and make money on it. I guess I'm coming more from the angle that I want to use something Open Source within my project which I would be charging money for.
Ah. The same does still apply, though. None of the major licenses are limited to certain kinds of uses. The "can't make money" idea comes from companies who want to be able to sell a Linux distribution (for example) without risking another company selling the same product for a lower price.
For the major licenses, though, you're fine charging whatever you like.
Awesome :) thank you for the reply!
If you check out the license file on Github you'll see a synopsis that includes whether it allows commercial use. I try to take advantage of open source as much as possible and generally try to stick to MIT, because it's permissive and the simplest. If you're looking to jump-start your SaaS there are also products you can purchase, such as Laravel Spark or Divjoy.
Thanks @Gabe I've been looking into Divjoy as well. I'll probably try it out at some point. What's the different between https://divjoy.com and https://usegravity.app/ other than the pricing? Use Gravity looks a lot more expensive, and from the surface almost the same features.
I made Divjoy, so I'm a bit biased, but I'll try to be objective here..
Divjoy is focused on letting you pick the custom stack you want (specific React framework, UI Kit, auth provider, etc) and combining your choices into a custom stack with as little boilerplate as possible.
Gravity is opinionated about the stack, but probably has more features out of the box, like admin dashboard, legal docs, etc. The more features, generally the more complexity and higher up-front learning curve. If you need a lot of those features and are willing to pay a premium for them then it's probably a great choice.
Thanks for the reply! Been looking at both. Really liking the pricing with Divjoy. Awesome product btw.
Thanks, appreciate that! Btw, just announced db integration: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/generate-a-custom-react-app-with-ui-auth-and-live-data-d9e6f2e77d :)
I'll check it out :) TY!