Comment by jeroenhd

9 days ago

Various projects have invented licenses like that. Those licenses aren't free, so the FOSS crowd won't like them. Rather than inventing a new one, you're probably better grabbing whatever the other not-free-but-close-enough projects are doing. Legal teams don't like bespoke licenses very much which hurts adoption.

An alternative I've seen is "the code is proprietary for 1 year after it was written, after that it's MIT/GPL/etc.", which keeps the code entirely free(ish) but still prevents many businesses from getting rich off your product and leaving you in the dust.

You could also go for AGPL, which is to companies like Google like garlic is to vampires. That would hurt any open core style business you might want to build out of your project though, unless you don't accept external contributions.

IANAL, but the Polyform Project (https://polyformproject.org/) apparently are, and they drafted a suite of licenses for these purposes.

Also, I'm not sure how anathema AGPL is. It's true I rarely see AGPL projects being hosted by big clouds, but AGPL is also just less popular as a license. I know AWS hosts AGPL Grafana, but iirc, they had to work out some deal with upstream.