> It was a SaaS that I was fine with letting end users copy and tinker with but didn't necessarily want big companies to do the same. Now that's obviously again

> It was a SaaS that I was fine with letting end users copy and tinker with but didn't necessarily want big companies to do the same. Now that's obviously against Free Software If you're talking about Libre Software then you were totally right in picking the AGPL: the goal is to put the user in control, not intermediaries. A big company providing a service through your software is not a user so you don't owe them anything. AGPL is actually the best license because if a company uses it, they must give their users the freedom you wanted to give users in the first place. > I found that at least for a SaaS that you'd like to make money off of, proprietary is the likely way to go. The always-renewed armada of email providers, all of them being just a slight variation of the same stack (postfix/dovecot/cyrus/rspam/any unix). It's the same for pretty much any internet service: I do believe that if it weren't for Open Source (not Libre Software), half of them wouldn't have taken the time and money to develop the necessary bricks. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and their monstruous influence, were made possible due to Open Source licenses that voluntarily didn't want to care about the user specifically. The success of your business will be orthogonal to the licence you choose. You are providing a service, ie making sure the software runs, isn't slow, is at the last secure version, allows people to register etc... none of which depends on whether your software is Open Source or not.