Which license should I use for my open-source / code-available software?
I've been building a platform that is going to make DevOps work on any cloud 10x easier and faster, meaning you either won't need to deal with DevOps at all or you will do only the tiny part which is really specific to you.
I've managed to build a lot of the features I wanted and now I want to make it open-source/code available.
My question is what license is the best? Can I start with CC and move to MIT later?
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On the topic of changing it later:
If you wrote all the code then yes you can change the license at any time to whatever you want.
If you have contributors then no, you generally can't re-publish their contributions under a different license, unless they have already agreed to a Contributor License Agreement that allows you to do that.
That's a great point. I'm just adding that agreement.
Good luck with your project sounds promising. Here are a bunch explanations for several licenses. Hope it helps. https://choosealicense.com/
Appreciate it.
healthchecks.io is using BSD 3 and it is a profitable open source project. It is making $8400 MRR (look about page)
I'm not sure about how it started (closed source/SaaS), but the code is on GitHub and it even has the billing features you can enable.
https://github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks
I agree, even Gitlab is open-source, but the tricky part is that while your brand is unknown you're not able to compete with anyone.
For example, even if someone starts selling
healthchecksbarely anyone will use it and everyone will still use the original and actual maintainer's service.That's why I started completely closed source, now I'm making in code-available and planning to go full open-source in the future.
Healthchecks founder/maintainer here :-)
I used an open-source license from the very beginning. In my experience:
Makes a lot of sense, thanks for sharing your experience.
Now the only concern I have would be perhaps the competition which not sure how much of an issue it can be.
MIT. Don't overthink it.
I'm actually seriously considering it.
I will say, the company I work for (~5k employees) got a bit upset that I didn't have the MIT license on some open source software I made that I integrated into our code. The company isn't some "corporate" gig, they're a pretty progressive tech company. So I was surprised. I was told they can't say much because of "NDAs". I think it is just lawyers covering the company as a "just in case".
I'd like to ask though, why not just give it MIT?
I don't want MIT because it gives the right to sell to others.
Did you write open-source software at your free time, and later integrate it in your employer's code? If you didn't use MIT license, what license did you use?
Yes, I wrote it in my free time and integrated it into company. I didn't have a license on it, which I thought defaulted to the most open; but I'm told it defaults to something that isn't as open as MIT.
If you don't specify a license then it defaults to proprietary.
I'm thinking about making getparthenon.com source-available where it would be free for people earning less than $50k a year. For that, I'll literally need a custom license which my lawyers quote at costing $500.
From what I've seen with open sourcing the actual project is that people will literally take your product and setup a competing product with your code. There are source-available licenses as is that can help prevent that. You can find some at https://polyformproject.org/
This is really difficult to achieve. I think the founder of Drone.io at the time tried this business model but at the end of the day he ended up selling it to Harness (which is not a bad thing but still not ideal).
Regarding the licensing it's true, I'm using source-available approach at the moment for that particular reason. I don't like the idea that you work on something for years and as it proves to be a viable idea and polished product with an already educated audience someone jumps in and without any effort take advantage of it.
Great name!
I don't know much about licensing. I just stick MIT on my opensource stuff.
Appreciate it.
Do you think it's not gonna cause any challenge making this a profitable business?
I was wondering should I wait until the brand gets some reputation or just make it MIT right away.
One idea is to keep the code locked down and build your paid product first.
Then once it's successful, take a subset of the code and open source it, to create a free scaled down version of your paid product.
That's actually exactly what I've been doing.
I take your feedback as a confirmation that it's not a weird thing to do and it makes sense to others too.
I dont think its at all weird, I have seen people use this approach. If you want to make you project open source I don't think that takes long or much. The bigger question is what you are aiming for on the long run...Great Project by the way all the best 👍
Happy to hear this, and excited to see you like the project.
Not sure I understood the part about long term goal correctly. Do you mean what's the plan for monetization?
Yes, most open source software I know are free, they have an option to donate or they sell support may be there is a way to monetise but as of yet I am not sure.
Well, I'm planning to sell it as a SaaS offering, same way as Gitlab, Sentry, Mongodb.
If you think about making money with it and it should run in the cloud you should consider AGPL. Here's an example from plausible (open source google analytics alternative) why they switched from MIT to AGPL:
https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses
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Now I can complete my project efficiently.
You should use the MIT License—recommended readings:
In building your project, you may end up making packages or tools that can stand on their own. I have already found and open-sourced a few libraries like that from my larger project.
Companies usually have a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) so that they can change the license again later. It’s very difficult if you didn’t set that up or chose the wrong license in the beginning.