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ricardobeattoday at 11:23 AM3 repliesview on HN

No success yet, but I recently found BUSL - used by Terraform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License

It stops companies from building high-revenue products for free, while not being as scary as AGPL/LGPL from the business perspective, and completely unrestricted for everyone else (despite not being technically an open-source license).


Replies

xorcisttoday at 12:22 PM

Once you decide on a non-free license, in the FSF sense, in the DFSG sense, and in the open source sense, does the details of the license matter much? You want as many people to pay as possible, and you do not wish for others to compete with you providing this software.

It's pretty much a standard non-free commercial license, which exact wording will matter only to purchasing department of your customers. It will be inconsequential to the broader open source community. Literally thousands of those exist and the specific wording matters very little.

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mihaelmtoday at 11:34 AM

You might also be interested in the O'Saasy license (https://osaasy.dev/) which is in the similar vein, but simpler.

HashiCorp switched to BUSL license for their products/tools when they already had substantial market share, and they still faced MPL-licensed forks (Terraform -> OpenTofu, Vault -> OpenBao). It will be interesting to see in a few years if those tools notably cut into their share.

I'm not sure a new tool with a BUSL license will get adoption as easily.

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ghafftoday at 11:44 AM

The heat around this particular issue has cooled down a bit and I'm not sure anyone is especially happy with the state of affairs. But questions around AI have sucked a lot of the oxygen from the room for now.