[traverseda]

You don't get to decide whether it's about fairness or not. It is going to be about fairness for a bunch of your early adopters. This is actually the kind of product I suspect I'd go for, I'm pretty firmly in your target audience. I'm the kind of person who has hacked python support into logseq for example. I'm telling you that fairness is a concern, and that I find requiring verified add-ons to be open source while not open sourcing your own code to be unfair.

Some big companies can do unfair stuff like this. Somehow obsidian manages. I don't think you can with what you have right now. You make a compelling enough project, spend enough money on marketing, you probably can. If you want grassroots support it's not happening with that model. At least not from me.

You could consider sharing the source under the business source license. That might still give you whatever protections you're looking for but that you're not stating outright. You have sort of dodged the question as to why it's not open source, and you're not saying what your future plans are that mean it can't be open source. That concerns me.

Give the BSL (business source license) some serious consideration. I don't think you're going to get a bunch of developer early adopters if they don't have some ownership over the product.