I'd like to commend the author for realizing that a commercial license was not achieving the goals he had for his software and being willing to own up publicly

I'd like to commend the author for realizing that a commercial license was not achieving the goals he had for his software and being willing to own up publicly about why and how he changed directions. However, while I have used MIT/BSD-style licenses in the past, I can no longer recommend them, as they potentially open up software users to malicious submarine patent attacks. That is, a contributor can intentionally contribute code that (purports to) read on a (not-even-issued-yet) patent, and then later threaten to sue users of the software. That's why I instead recommend Apache-2.0. My arguments are more fully described here: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/01/cncf-recommends-aslv2/ https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/01/cncf-recommends-aslv2/