11–14 of 14 posts
There’s nothing wrong with that and a commercial license is the simplest thing that might work. If you want to improve the world with your software charge enough that you can donate cash to your local food bank without a second thought…the hungry need your charity more than developers. Good luck.
You don’t have to use a FLOSS license to get most of the things that come with a typical FLOSS project.
I suggest you consider BTPL [1] or a PolyForm license [2].
[1]: https://bigtimelicense.com/versions/2.0.2 [2]: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/
If you are already considering the AGPL, I'd like to suggest the EUPL. It also covers SaaS, is copyleft (forbids nonfree forks), but non-viral (can link to nonfree software), a lot easier to read, and also doesn't have the "bad name" some people attach to the GPL family. I can't speak to how well it fits in your usecase. There are too many ways to do monetization, and I don't know which one you have in mind. But copy…
Thanks a lot for this idea. I did not know about this. Do you have any experience with EUPL or with projects that use it? But wouldn't in that case people just use it as a library and do whatever they want? EUPL feels like LGPL, doesn't it?
Copyleft protects against proprietary forking, and also assures the community you can't close the source in the future. Weak/non-viral copyleft makes it so you can still link it to proprietary software, so you could sell integrations (non-LSP) or closed-source plugins.
LGPL and GPL licensed software can be provided over a network with proprietary changes. The AGPL and EUPL both close that hole. Every change to the modules covered by the EUPL must be open sourced, even in that case.
If your intention is to monetize the LSP itself, open source is probably not what you want. It's fundamental to open source that anyone can use it for any purpose, and also fork it. Permissive licenses like the MIT license allow relicensing to a proprietary license later (see Redis) but that causes problems with the community (see Redis), and is nearly guaranteed to cause a fork.
MIT is great for fast adoption, but if you go that route, you’d need closed-source add-ons or a SaaS layer to monetize. Apache is also good for adoption and for getting corporate clients and sponsors, but the trade-off is that anyone can take your code and repackage it without contributing back. GPL or AGPL gives you more direct monetization options because it forces reciprocity. GPL protects against proprietary redi…
For example, the Linux kernel is purposefully GPLv2 instead of GPLv2-or-later.