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by h2odragon 930 days ago
You going to be upset if someone else makes a fork and charges for use of it? You want that not to happen, or to have you name on it when it does, or to have a share of any money?

I think we need to know more about your goals, what you want to achieve here.

If its just fill your own need, and let the rest of the world use that and maybe even build on it, but you dont really give a shit once your happy, then MIT would be a great choice.

If you're concerned with how people use your code then you probably want something more restrictive.

1 comments

Hey appreciate you asking!

I guess I'd be very happy if there was someone who was much more ambitious than me, who saw an opportunity to make a lot of money by doing sales on the product. It'd be great to work together with that person in a support-type role. And honestly, I wouldn't mind if they wanted to try it alone.

What would hurt though would be to do a lot of work to get it into a state where it was "the best" in some way, and a big player started selling a cheaper fork.

Sounds like you don't want open source then. It's fine, really.

Even the AGPL allows forking. And there's nothing to sell actually.

If you have plans to self managed solutions and don't want to compete with other players doing the same, look into the source available licenses (BSL and others). They are not open source though, so please don't add those two words to your website.

Open source will get you more traction initially since some people won't even consider proprietary solutions in some cases. But it comes at a cost.

If this project is not expected to be your main income, maybe open source would work. Depends on your goals.

When I say sell, I'm thinking "managed hosting and support" -- not the software itself. That seems like a pretty decent approach to me.

Definitely the main goal is to provide something better to people trying to do manufacturing. I'm not hoping to get rich, but also wouldn't mind making it a full-time thing if there were enough demand for new features/support/etc.