[symlock]

Very Interested, but what markers are there for me to trust you/your company? Is it Open Source? Have you been around for long? Are you audited? Is there a sustainable business model?

The https://www.zood.xyz/products/location#about-zood-location page doesn't really say anything other than you promise you are doing what you say (and you probably are).

[apayan]

Fair question. As of this writing, there isn't anything to trust me short of sniffing all the packets coming out of the phone and/or decompiling the APK.

While in beta, I'm not charging, but in order to align my interests with those of users I will be charging for it once I'm done beta testing. So far I've only been testing with family and close friends.

The app isn't currently open source, but I want to find a license model that will let folks see the source code while still preventing someone from forking it and running their own instance of my company. As you noted, this needs to be a sustainable endeavor, and I think that would be unlikely if I just release it all under MIT or BSD-3

It's too early for an audit (and I don't have the money for one yet), but I'm using libsodium for the crypto so there's no need to worry about me writing my own bad crypto primitves.

The website is sparse, because the current audience for it is my family and friends who I've contacted about helping me with the beta testing. I intend to flesh out the site a lot more before I come out of beta.

[ocdtrekkie]

You could do a reference source-type thing, where it isn't open source and using your source is prohibited, but people can browse it for specified purposes, such as auditing security issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative#Restr...

Copyleft open source licenses only help you so much, people can still clone your company as long as their version is also open source. There's no way to prohibit corporate use of your code and still have an OSI-approved license.

The spot that kinda falls between those two classes is if you want people to be able to fork or self-host for personal/non-commercial use, and there's a few also not open source license examples out there for that too. There's a couple of that sort listed under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software (Commons Clause or Mega Limited Code Review sound fairly similar to what you might want.)

[apayan]

Despite being a big fan of copyleft, the "source available" license sounds like the right direction for Zood. Thanks for that link. I had not heard about Commons Clause or Mega Limited Code Review. I'll dig into it those.