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While the community may be a good source for ideas, you should retain an attorney. The community is not your lawyer. There's also the BSL. It specifically call

While the community may be a good source for ideas, you should retain an attorney. The community is not your lawyer. There's also the BSL. It specifically calls out competitive products. It automatically falls away for code older than a given time to another OSI license: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License. Per the Wikipedia article this still has issues: contributors are handing over their work for to you for free for that duration, they can't use their own work for profit. The AGPL does make your project extremely unattractive to competition, without affecting your contributors. The issue is that it is still possible to compete with you using it, so long as your competition releases all their code (i.e. infra, billing, etc.) under AGPL. I would personally go for AGPL because it will keep the worst offenders (Amazon, Microsoft) away from your code.

harshithmul 2y ago
Understood, Thank you. Really appreciate all that information.
KolmogorovComp 2y ago
Using BSL would make their code source-available but it wouldn’t be open-source anymore, unlike AGPL.
- evantbyrne 2y ago
  The Business Source License allows for redistribution and modification of code. Calling it not open-source because it restricts third-parties from slapping a logo on it and selling licenses seems like a stretch. imo licenses like the BSL are really the direction that open-source should be heading in, because they allow the original author to retain their rights while avoiding exploitation by rando corporations.
  - KolmogorovComp 2y ago
    No, it’s not an open-source license because it’s not OSI compliant https://opensource.org/licenses https://opensource.org/licenses. Open-source has a specific meaning that too many people don’t know or forgot.
    - evantbyrne 2y ago
      This feels like splitting hairs and unnecessary gatekeeping, and I'm not sure for what purpose or for who's intended benefit. The movement needs to evolve to better protect the rights of the people actually doing the work, because they are the ones who are benefiting the least by the narrow definition being pushed by the OSI. Maybe we need a new term if this is how "open-source" is seen in the broader community.
      - satvikpendem 2y ago
        The term is "source available," but I guess with that, companies can't use "open source" as a marketing term then pull the rug after they got enough contributions, like so many that converted to BSL and others now. By creating rights for those companies such that they cannot be competed with, you actually remove the rights of users, which is the whole reason the open source and free software movements got started in the first place. They are and always have been about the rights of users, not of corporations.
        evantbyrne 2y ago
        What are you talking about? I don't know where you live or what project you are referring to, but it's not possible to retroactively remove someone's rights in the American legal system by publishing a new license. If you committed code under a MIT license without signing anything else, you don't lose anything when later versions are published under BSL, AGPL, or whatever. The fact that the MIT license arguably allows willy nilly relicensing by anyone should be seen as a flaw with that license, not BSL. Also the context of this conversation is what license is appropriate for a new project. It makes less sense to apply a BSL to a MIT licensed project that has been around for a while than it does to start off with a BSL.
        satvikpendem 2y ago
        I'm not even sure how what you're saying relates to what I said; of course no license can be retroactively changed and I never said anything to the contrary. By rug pull, I mean companies like Sentry or MongoDB starting off as open source then changing their license such that they are no longer open source, making it a much more difficult legal minefield for whomever uses their product, even if they aren't competing with them, as they are now source available companies. As a copyright holder, any license can be changed for the future, whether it be MIT, AGPL, or BSL. With regards to a new project, sure, they can license it however they want but if it's not open source, they should expect to get way fewer contributions than if it were.

harshithmul 2y ago

Understood, Thank you. Really appreciate all that information.

KolmogorovComp 2y ago

Using BSL would make their code source-available but it wouldn’t be open-source anymore, unlike AGPL.

evantbyrne 2y ago
The Business Source License allows for redistribution and modification of code. Calling it not open-source because it restricts third-parties from slapping a logo on it and selling licenses seems like a stretch. imo licenses like the BSL are really the direction that open-source should be heading in, because they allow the original author to retain their rights while avoiding exploitation by rando corporations.
- KolmogorovComp 2y ago
  No, it’s not an open-source license because it’s not OSI compliant https://opensource.org/licenses https://opensource.org/licenses. Open-source has a specific meaning that too many people don’t know or forgot.
  - evantbyrne 2y ago
    This feels like splitting hairs and unnecessary gatekeeping, and I'm not sure for what purpose or for who's intended benefit. The movement needs to evolve to better protect the rights of the people actually doing the work, because they are the ones who are benefiting the least by the narrow definition being pushed by the OSI. Maybe we need a new term if this is how "open-source" is seen in the broader community.
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      The term is "source available," but I guess with that, companies can't use "open source" as a marketing term then pull the rug after they got enough contributions, like so many that converted to BSL and others now. By creating rights for those companies such that they cannot be competed with, you actually remove the rights of users, which is the whole reason the open source and free software movements got started in the first place. They are and always have been about the rights of users, not of corporations.
      - evantbyrne 2y ago
        What are you talking about? I don't know where you live or what project you are referring to, but it's not possible to retroactively remove someone's rights in the American legal system by publishing a new license. If you committed code under a MIT license without signing anything else, you don't lose anything when later versions are published under BSL, AGPL, or whatever. The fact that the MIT license arguably allows willy nilly relicensing by anyone should be seen as a flaw with that license, not BSL. Also the context of this conversation is what license is appropriate for a new project. It makes less sense to apply a BSL to a MIT licensed project that has been around for a while than it does to start off with a BSL.
        satvikpendem 2y ago
        I'm not even sure how what you're saying relates to what I said; of course no license can be retroactively changed and I never said anything to the contrary. By rug pull, I mean companies like Sentry or MongoDB starting off as open source then changing their license such that they are no longer open source, making it a much more difficult legal minefield for whomever uses their product, even if they aren't competing with them, as they are now source available companies. As a copyright holder, any license can be changed for the future, whether it be MIT, AGPL, or BSL. With regards to a new project, sure, they can license it however they want but if it's not open source, they should expect to get way fewer contributions than if it were.