License questions

[dirkcuys]

Hey @HermanMartinus,

I was thinking about first party analytics yesterday and randomly noticed this on my GitHub feed. I really like the idea and what I've seen looks good!

But I have some questions about the license. I like AGPL, but the additional terms would make it very hard to actually use this in any of my work. The main issue is that it is very difficult to define what constitutes commercial.

I guess it boils down to - what is your goal for this project. I don't want to imply that you are under any obligation to share under a specific license, just curious to learn a bit more.

[HermanMartinus]

Hey @dirkcuys

To be honest, I haven't given the license enough thought. The only thing I'm trying to protect against is a company reselling Bearlytics as a hosted service (the Wordpress + WP Engine debacle is still fresh).

I'm happy to modify the terms in a way that makes sense in your business. I'm also thinking that the AGPL may even be too restrictive. I'd be okay with modifications not necessarily being made public if its for personal use, but would like to retain the part of any released modification needs to keep retain the existing license.

I'd appreciate your input on this, as it's my first time stepping outside of MIT share-alike.

[HermanMartinus]

As for my goal for the project, I built it for myself and it worked well enough that I suspected other people would enjoy an easy-to-self-host web analytics platform. If there is a demand for managed hosting (see the issue I opened about it), then I'd like to retain exclusive rights to monetising it, since I've seen way too many FOSS devs become fed up with other companies profiting by reselling their work.

[dirkcuys]

The licenses I've used are MIT, GPL and CC-BY-SA. I have opinions on other licenses, but can't claim any deep expertise.

Selfishly I would say MIT, but I don't think you should change it for me, I can't bring you 💰 💰 💰 or lots of users.

I have some thoughts about your concern that a big company will cannibalize your business, but those thoughts are a bit too unstructured for text. I'll send you a mail if you want to connect

[HermanMartinus]

Yeah, pop me a mail 👍