I hope people know my history and how I've run projects in the past.
But what this does for me is keep me from releasing anything open core. With ansible, ansible was open source but the GUI was not, and we had to hold something back.
The traditional alternatives to OSS are to make a support business, which somewhat encourages making buggy or hard to install software, or a consulting business (IMHO, same) and all of those detract from building a product, collectively, with some of your favorite people on the internet.
So basically Vespene is going to be like a pseudo-foundation.
The structure for this is described here - http://docs.vespene.io/partnership.html - which keeps consulting and support totally free for small shops, and encouraging larger ones that could potentially make millions form Vespene to give back a very small amount.
What normally happens is large companies close six figure contracts supporting open source, and they don't give back a dime, and my goal here is to essentially make a developer's salary off of this project by having those who make more give back a very small amount.
This seems pretty fair to me, but I also recognize that some people don't agree with it.
That all being said, it's not a "no-commercial" clause in any way, and still free for small consultancies, so I'm not anticipating any major problems.
Most of the time, software gets installed in a place of business for that business.
For some of my previous thoughts on this, I'd refer folks to https://medium.com/@michaeldehaan/why-open-source-needs-new-... and later my current thinking https://medium.com/@michaeldehaan/going-with-the-commons-cla...
It's not something I've considered lightly, but this keeps MORE software open, and for a small one-person shop, I think that's more noble than trying to hold some code back and not release it at all.
Some people just want 100% free, gimme gimme, etc - and fine - you're entitled to pick one of those things. That's ok.
I personally view this a little more pragmatically, under the view of fairness, and also have taken steps (in the CLA, etc), to guarantee that trust is never going to be abused.
For instance, the license reverts to pure Apache if Vespene were ever to change hands.
On the downside, I can't get screwed over by IBM or Amazon while I'm trying to crank out free software for everyone. That seems fair too, seeing the time investment running an open source community and working on the code takes.