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Ask HN: What are your experiences with source-available licensing?

5 points by mlmitch ↗ HN
I am working on some software that I would like to open-source. I want to build a business around the software though. Therefore, I have (seemingly common) concerns regarding a competing company using the software.

There are some source-available licenses that seem to offer most of the good parts of open-source and protect against my worries. However, I'm not sure if source-available or these licenses in particular are the right way to go.

https://polyformproject.org/

Does anyone here have source-available experience they can share? There are almost certainly aspects of this decision that I haven't considered.

5 comments

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verdverm
Check out JJ's site https://coss.media and be sure to check out his interviews on YouTube, in particular the one with Sid from GitLab and another with Armory

Too much amazing info to unpack here

mlmitch
Thanks! Definitely some good info there.
verdverm
With source available, you can't use the words open source anymore. These licenses are starting to be rejected by the OSS license committee.

IMHO, the companies using these want to have their cake and eat it too.

Look at how Google has partnered with these companies that did this relicensing primarily because of Amazon. Look what Amazon did with elastic search

mlmitch
> With source available, you can't use the words open source anymore. These licenses are starting to be rejected by the OSS license committee.

Is this something to worry about? I am more concerned with the actual effects on users than terminology. I'd love to hear otherwise though.

verdverm
We're not doing these Faux Pas licenses and claiming open source. We want to actually be open source as we believe it is better for all in the long run.

Do you want to do open source or something else? Are you worrying about Amazon before you need to? Set up contributor agreements a certain way (like Google, not GitLab) and you can change it later once we know more about how it works out.