Licensing

[tj]

Figure out what makes sense, complete license noob.

• OSS license
• Pro license
• Make sure deps are permissive
• CLA? Don't bother?

[arikfr]

With tools like https://cla-assistant.io/ having a CLA become very low friction, so I would incline towards having one. Will give you more freedom in regards to how structure OSS vs. Pro later on.

[tj]

@arikfr awesome thanks for the tip!

[stephenlacy]

CLA definitely, cla-assistant is made by github so that's even more 🎉

[ryansb]

I am not a lawyer, and if you need lawyerly advice I recommend finding a real one. I've been in OSS for a while, so here's my experience.

I'm not sure how much CLA's really help, since the IP issues would fall under the license. Plus, the more you can do to let people not read extra legalese before contributing the better. I recommend picking an OSS license (https://choosealicense.com/) and remember you can still do pro licensing/dual licensing.

So you can do something like pick a copyleft license like the Affero GPL and then offer to make other licensing options available for some cost. That model basically means the project is free & open for people - but corporations can pay to not upstream changes. The downside of this model is, of course, that you have to set up a way to pay you & track licenses.

Another option is the simple, permissive MIT/Apache route where basically anyone can use it and make changes without contributing back. It depends what you want to do, but I hope this helps!

[arikfr]

I'm not sure how much CLA's really help, since the IP issues would fall under the license.

IANAL but from the legal advise I got, each contributor holds the IP rights of their contributions. While they grant these rights through the chosen license, it still prevents TJ from dual licensing or changing a license in the future. To have complete freedom (and right) to do whatever he wishes, he needs the IP assigned to him -- which is what the CLA is for.

[tj]

Interesting thanks guys! Maybe I'll stay clear of contrib until I get my lawyers involved but sounds like the CLA should do the trick

[kaihendry]

Please choose MIT/X consortium or BSD licenses. No lawyers needed. Besos,

[lukeed]

@kaihendry He has to involve lawyers because it's primarily a paid-for product. @tj is doing the community a favor by open sourcing part of the product.

Imagine you were Facebook and accepted a React PR from the community. If there weren't a CLA process, any React contributor can sue & claim partial ownership/responsibility of React and, by extension, partial financial gains that Facebook has made via React.

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While the above may not be technically accurate, it still describes the scenario that needs to be prevented from the beginning.

[tj]

@kaihendry I have to make a living unfortunately :D no startup paying my bills. I don't have time for 100% free OSS anymore.

I'll learn more about this stuff and see how permissive the open portion can be without screwing myself over, I should probably pick the pricing model first and go from there, depending on that it might be fine to go with MIT or similar.

[kaihendry]

@lukeed Have a contributor.md line where ownership is given up or copyright is transferred to the project? I'm trying to keep it simple here. Creative commons and other (well meaning) initiatives have just made it worse..

I thought we were almost living in the days where being the platform was enough, but I guess the problem here is AWS is 'the platform' and tooling is difficult to monetize. Wish that AWS marketplace didn't suck so much.

[tj]

I think there's a demand to have this sort of UX self-hosted on AWS etc, it's definitely something I want, I can live without it though since I'm AWS-savvy, but most people don't care to learn about AWS.

Plus if it's $25/m with some startup that might go out of business or maybe doesn't have the features, isolation, or security you want, then might as well pay $10/m or whatever for a self-hosted option (where free tier covers most anyway) that works just as well if not better. Both are pretty hands-off these days.

Could be totally wrong but I'm assuming larger companies would appreciate proper legal stuff as well, to make them feel safer that I won't just get sued for using someone's work or whatever (as unlikely as that is haha). Doubt that really happens in practice but hey! Better safe than sorry. Definitely no point worrying about it until I see some traction.

[arikfr]

It's true that some lawyers will just complicate things to justify their fees -- I've seen a law firm add meaningless clause to a BSD license just show something for their time.

But a good lawyer will give you a solid advice that will spare you from a lot of uncertainty and headache in the future. I have one to recommend (the one I consulted with), but he's local in Israel. Might be happy to work remote though, I don't know.

Definitely no point worrying about it until I see some traction.

Usually this is true, but I would at least consult with a lawyer to get a sense of things before accepting the first pull request. Another option is to follow what @mperham did with Sidekiq -- I think it resembles the model you want to implement here :-)

[tj]

@arikfr definitely getting some inspiration there from Sidekiq's model, clearly working really well for him :D

[mperham]

Howdy! I believe Copyleft is important if selling the software is your main source of revenue. Go with a GNU license unless you need to maximize distribution and usage (warning: it also maximizes your free users and therefore support costs).

[tj]

@mperham makes sense! Thanks man. I've definitely found out the hard way with a little SaaS project that free plans don't work haha (support and cost in my case).