How do you choose a license for your source available project?

In the next month or so, myself and cofounder are going to be putting out the first public release of our new robotics framework. It's super important that it's easy to download and try - the incumbent is BSD licensed. However - we aren't prepared to go fully open ourselves (at least not yet). We believe what we're doing is useful and needed for the industry, but we also need to make sure that we find a way to fund development within the next year or so (either via VC or bootstrapping). We don't want to lock ourselves out of actually being able to support the framework full time.

The dream for licensing for the short term is something like Unreal Engine - you don't pay money if you aren't making money off of it, and it's relatively easy to download and try. To be specific:

1. You can't relicense the code

2. You can't fork the code and call it your own thing

3. You _can_ fork the code for your own use, all other conditions being met

4. If you're a hobbyist or student making a robot in your garage, we don't care what you do as long as you don't break any other terms

5. If you're any kind of company and just want to try out the framework to kick the tires, it's very easy. As long as you don't release a product with our code compiled onto it, we don't care.

6. If you're a startup with no money, we want to give you a very generous license

7. If you are any other kind of company, we still want to give you a very generous license :)

I'm okay with not handling the noncommercial cases for now. I'm not worried for the short term about anyone actually building a robot on top of the thing and releasing it, it's still somewhat pre-alpha after all. But what I do want is a license that actually says what we intend for the code.

Looking around, another new idea in the space has a completely regular Apache 2.0 license. Maybe we're worrying too hard about the license for now.