How exactly does that work with the MIT license? If someone sponsors and gains access to the repo, they're permitted to fork and redistribute the code, right?
Nothing in the MIT license prevents you from doing that. But the author could disable your access to the repo any time, and once that happens, your fork would be forever out of date I'd expect.
Of course, doing so would make me question why the author released this under a permissive license to begin with.
I'm not looking to block anyone. I want this to be open. And I don't want a confusing license. The code is pretty unobscured on npm so its less convenient but the source is free for anyone who can be bothered to go that route.
My reasoning is more that this is my side project, and I have limited time, and this seems like a good experiment to see if I can make OSS sustainable for once and also allow me to target help (my free time) towards users who are most invested in the project.
In the future I would like to open the repo but it might be tied to hitting a sponsorship amount or perhaps an extra service/product on top for those that want it.
Yeah that's fine. But repo access is more a convenience upsell, you can always get the source code (or pretty close transpiled code) from the npm distribution.
Of course, doing so would make me question why the author released this under a permissive license to begin with.