alt Hacker NewsQuestion about the license choice: now that we're past so many projects that started up as FOSS but with a longer-term plan of monetization and/or corporate-tier support level, which saw their choice of license allowing other bigger players to just get the code and run a competing service with proprietary extensions (which is what something so exceedingly open as MIT allows), isn't there any worry that this could happen again here?
I'm curious if AGPL shouldn't be more common (even though it's not a silver bullet), but MIT projects with foreseeable needs of some monetization to survive long term never ceased to show up, despite so many FOSS drama in the last couple years.
Great question and I think about this a lot. I chose MIT deliberately and I'll explain why.
My graduate research focused on common computer security misconceptions — one of the biggest being that open source is inherently insecure. The algorithms and systems we trust most are the ones open to public scrutiny. AES was selected through an open competition where every candidate was published for the world to attack. TLS, SHA-256, RSA — their security comes from transparency, not obscurity. I believe the same applies to software infrastructure.
Could a bigger player take this and run a competing service? Sure, MIT allows that. But I'd rather have the code out there being used, audited, and improved than restrict it to protect a business model I don't even have yet. If someone like AWS wraps this in a managed service, that honestly means I built something worth wrapping — and the open version still exists for anyone who wants to self-host.
I've thought about the Canonical model — paid support around a free product — and I might go there someday. But I don't have years of production use behind this yet. We all start somewhere. Right now I'd rather focus on making the software good and building a community around it than optimizing a license for a monetization strategy that doesn't exist.
AGPL is a valid choice and I respect projects that use it. But for me, MIT is a statement about what I actually care about — the code being out there for everyone.