> I could see copy-cat services being more of an issue in the late stage of a product though? When everyone knows lots about how to stand it up and use it? The

> I could see copy-cat services being more of an issue in the late stage of a product though? When everyone knows lots about how to stand it up and use it? The concern isn't random small companies. The concern is the big cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google. And you are right, they aren't going build out a hosted version of your product until there is enough traction. But at that point, customers might indeed trust them more than you to run your own software! Redis and Elastic ran into this problem for example. The most likely scenario though - is never getting traction - so anything to improve traction such as permissive licensing is probably a better tradeoff.