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Personally as a free software zealot, I'm actually pretty happy with zerotier's licensing. The BSL license they've chosen reverts to MIT after 5 years, so there

Personally as a free software zealot, I'm actually pretty happy with zerotier's licensing. The BSL license they've chosen reverts to MIT after 5 years, so there's very little risk of vendor lock in. As near as I can tell everything except their web interface has the source available, so there's nothing that makes you dependent on their infrastructure. It means that you need to negotiate with them if you want to build a product on top of their work (unless it's older than 5 years) but other than that minor compromise it keeps in spirit with free software.

api 5y ago
ZeroTier founder here: we don't love the BSL, but it's helped defend us so far from marketing shell startups and huge corporations just taking our stuff and rebranding it and saying "thanks, we'll take that now." Networking is a particularly bad market for this. In the future we want to do something better for licensing, but we're thinking carefully about it and researching it a lot since we don't want to change licenses too much. My ideal license would be free/libre for individual humans and something closer to AGPL or BSL for for-profit work and corporations, but that is virtually impossible to do with a license that will work in every major jurisdiction. It sounds straightforward but according to lawyers I've spoke with it is not. We also want to document and eventually standardize the protocol, probably post-V2. I'm calling it GVSP: Global Virtual Switch Protocol. There's a few things we want to revise first.