Yes! You can't have it both ways. You can't have random people submit IP to your codebase and then own the monetization of the end result.
You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it.
You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you.
You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no one will ever use your software.
How do you see this working?
Services
Open source is a choice. You get a lot of early adopters, yes, but the project is also completely out of your control. There's nothing stopping anyone else from taking it, putting more resources into it, and stealing your thunder.
If you're not happy with that idea, just don't make your code open source. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
What I don't like is the companies that create some open source project for the hype, then charge for a 'management console' or some marginal add-on.
It's in every way a better product than the hosted AWS ElasticSearch service, which I find to be practically unusable. More importantly, I don't know anywhere that uses AWS ElasticSearch where ElasticSearch is a core component of someone's platform.
The problem Elastic has is that their Cloud isn't remotely as good as self-hosting. Using their Cloud doesn't abstract away the domain knowledge needed to operate ElasticSearch at scale, so anyone who uses it and becomes competent will eventually self-host.
If they can get better at abstracting away the arcane knowledge needed to operate ES, AWS won't be a problem for them.
Gitlab is a good example.
more attractively is the all code for free model, so those who are able can use it for free, and you charge a fee for people who are in need of professional support.
a third one is still all code for free, but you can pay for hosted service instead of self-host the code, time is money for many people these days.
in all cases, you're building a group of followers with OSS, and you sell the hard-to-grasp or time-is-money-for-some-user domain expertise.
how to build your moat as far as competition goes? anyone that is smarter than you could copy all the code and do the same business model, the only thing might be a good license? however these days most OSS license are commercial friendly so I don't know how this works.
On the one hand, I really do understand the needs here, on the other I wish there was a better option.
I wouldn't even mind seeing something like the new MongoDB license + open-core as a non-profit organization that funded the development of several shared projects, where what licensing it does get is directly towards development. It's much different when you are absolutely profit driven.
There are a lot of software problems that are hard, but the results can be shared.
> AGPL meant companies who wanted to modify and run MongoDB as a publicly available service had to open source their software or obtain a commercial license from MongoDB
With the new license:
> The only substantive change is an explicit condition that any organization attempting to exploit MongoDB as a service must open source the software that it uses to offer such service
Aaaaaaaaaaaand from the license text itself https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license:
> “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.