[vidbina]

I share the pain of musing over license options.

From a pure business perspective, I feel like there are more data points out there that have won (as in, "survived") by shipping proprietary software.

Don't want to make moral judgements here about proprietary-vs-FLOSS but within my hacker bubbles, one biases themselves to be partial to FLOSS very easily. If I were to ship "some things" (it really depends what the thing is) as proprietary, this community may not take too kindly to that move (and neither may I).

On the other hand, I don't think that the world at large really cares. Sometimes it feels that one can either be a) financially well off or b) more beloved by the hacker community. These things are not mutually exclusive like that but the union of these is rather rare. Hard choices!

[didgetmaster]

Speaking of license options, even if you decide to release all your code as open source, there are so many options to choose from. I counted 116 different open source licenses that are currently 'blessed' by OSI: https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical How do you pick the 'right one' for your project that you won't regret later on?

[MichaelCollins]

Look at what other similar projects have been doing, and if it's been working out well enough for them. And if you are the sole copyright owner, you're not locked into your choice. You can either refuse community contributions or make them sign over the copyright to you. Then you're free to distribute your software under another license going further.

Proprietary software doesn't save you from having to make decisions like this. Proprietary software can be licenced under many different terms. Are you going to sell perpetual per-seat licenses? Subscriptions? Selling updates? Support contracts? Avoiding future regret is always going to be a speculative affair.