Comment by Spivak

I would ignore the haters, keeping Orion proprietary makes the most sense for being able to successfully charge for it as a commercial product. You can't sell an OSS product, only supporting services, as many many startups have realized and been forced to relicense to much anger within their respective communities.

And when the market is going to be primarily technical people I don't think you can trust them/us with source-available either as hackers with a strong aversion to paying for software thinking themselves clever will make and distribute bootleg builds with the license checks removed. Then you'll have to spend your time finding and DMCAing them which will only make people mad. Best to avoid it entirely.

I appreciate you/Kagi actually thinking about building a sustainable business in contrast to companies that open source their core competency and then fail to make money later.

Source: happy paying customer and user of Orion.