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What license would fit this use case?
I have an open source license question for a project of mine that I am planning on opensourcing.
This was born as a blogging platform that I run for a little while as a paid/managed service until I joined Brella (my current employer), then I shut it down.
More recently I picked it up again and made some changes so to make it easier to create simple websites, not necessarily blogs, and was planning to relaunch it as a website builder with some AI features, however I decided to pivot soon after to something else (a managed Kubernetes service) since the market of website builders is too saturated.
So, I am planning to opensource DynaSite in the near future, but I want to choose a license that allows self hosting for personal or commercial use as long as the app is not used in any service to sell it to others.
In other words, I want to forbid others from creating a hosting service based on this app, just in case in the future I might decide to go back to my previous plans and launch it as a managed service.
What would be the best license for this kind of scenario? Thanks.
Comments
AGPL or the Mongo License
Thanks! Will read more about these. I am ashamed to admit that I am not too familiar with the various licenses.
IANAL but you are looking for something like the Elastic license which Elastic used to prevent AWS from hosting their own version of Elasticsearch. https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license
Many people consider this to be a particularly crappy move and it also led to Amazon creating Open search as a fork of the last version of elastic search that was more permissibly licensed.
The AGPL just ensures that any modifications to software that you are hosting as a service be released publicly as well, but doesn’t prevent other companies from offering hosted versions of the software.
And that's exactly what I want to prevent
What about the business ethics and marketing? Would a customer necessarily choose a hindered and practically closed-source platform with their data? Why your app and hosting service over the many others that are free and allow easy data portability?
what tech stack you are using? just find similar keywords in github and check what others/competition is doing using your tech stack and functionality
Closed source? I said I will open source it so others can use it, I just don't want anyone to make a business out of it since I might do that later myself
The app is written in Rails
in that case mongodb type license is best bet, also consider the happening around terraform vs opentofu
Admittedly I haven't followed the Terraform thing.... I guess I need to do some reading
I think the Elastic license would suit you well, this part seems to be what you are after:
You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software.Yeah that sounds perfect, I think I am going with this one. Thanks!
Me, too. I found this to be a good writeup:
https://lkravi.medium.com/terraform-vs-opentofu-b4d2b519b3fa
When you write a wrapper around the AGPL software, you have to release the source code of that one as well. That means when you are simply building a panel with billing and stuff around the open source software you have to release everyhing, which is a big no-no for most people. This is also why AGPL is completely banned within Google.
if you expect people to contribute PR then this is how you should go MIT -> Mongo like -> Elastic , you will need a roadmap at what point/feature you want to change the license from MIT to anything else, usually its done around multitenancy feature if applicable