Which software license?

We love open source.

We also love making a living from a viable business.

These two loves don’t have a great history of going together particularly well.

Bruce Perens, the creator of The Open Source Definition and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), describes current open source licenses as unfit for purpose.

So we haven’t explicitly selected a license just yet which defaults to us having copyright. We’re learning about the Business Source License whereby:

• The source code is available for anyone to see, copy, modify, create derivative works, redistribute, and make non-production use of (defined below)

• The license transitions to a GPL Version 2.0+ or equivalent at some date no later than the fourth anniversary of the first public distribution of the version of code in question.

You can check out the Wikipedia entry for the license here, and if you have any thoughts on the matter one way or another, or indeed expertise, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Non-production use

Includes:

• Personal use: Using the software for personal projects or hobbies.

• Internal use for development and testing: Includes staging environments, development servers, and CI/CD pipelines.

• Educational use: For teaching, learning, or research purposes.

• Internal tools and utilities: i.e. Not offered as a product or service.

• Proof of concept and prototyping: To demonstrate functionality or feasibility.

Production use

Production use may be considered anything that competes with the business interests of the licensor. Typically includes:

• Offering the software as a service (SaaS): Providing the software as a hosted service.

• Embedding the software in a commercial product: Including the software as a component of a product that is made available to customers.

• Using the software to provide a core business function: Using the software in a way that is essential to the operation of a business.