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Redis and Mongo have tried this - see https://redis.com/legal/licenses/

Officially they are not OSI approved but they go straight to the heart of the issue :

>>> has only two primary limitations. You may not:

Commercialize the software or provide it to others as a managed service Remove or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices

I don't think "source available" is really that viable of a model. MS tried that with a lot of their developer offerings before more became truly FLOSS, specifically in the .Net space.

In the end, I'm less likely to trust/use ANY non-floss software/services that doesn't have a clear and clean exit path. I can use CockroachLabs (CockroachDB cloud) as I can exit pretty cleanly to self-hosted PostgreSQL with other models. I can abstract the usage of say DynamoDB to target other options relatively easily as well.

That said, tethering deeply into rented services, or commercial+floss providers can only hook you in the end if things get too dicey. And you only need to look at Oracle and IBM/RedHat as examples of the hook you and reel you in approach. A lot of businesses are also pretty deeply tied into a given cloud platform. They all have nice to have, relatively easy to use features/services. If you don't have an exit strategy, you better have a fat wallet. It's not that it won't still be painful to exit, but without at least a strategy, you're trapped.

I think an alternative is to fund _individuals' maintenance of the projects_, as opposed to the project itself. Filippo Valsorda has written about this recently: https://words.filippo.io/full-time-maintainer

That's an interesting idea, thank you, I'll read through the post.

EDIT: I found the post interesting but unfortunately these projects are in no way load-bearing. I'm happy to hear Filippo has made it work for himself but as he points out, the projects he works on are simply much better suited to sponsorship and retainer/consulting agreements. I wonder what he would recommend for newer or less-load-bearing projects.

sorry. what does that mean here - load bearing

Maintenance takes up a lot of time.

What ChibiOS does is release under GPL3 and then sell a commercial dual license. This is definitely open source and also means most non-open-source commercial use would need to pay for a license. It’s probably also one reason why FreeRTOS is much more popular in business than ChibiOS.

https://www.chibios.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=chibios:licensi...

I asked this question in a discord for this kind of stuff and the answer I got was "not possible." I also spoke with the developer of OrbStack, and they suggested just not being open source and charging for it, which is what they're going to do. When it comes to dev tools (particularly those that are involved in operations/sre flows like pgmigrate) I consider open source a huge benefit, and I'm sad to think that there is no way to get paid for an open source project without shoehorning in a bad experience or unnecessary features (like Baldur points out)

License it as AGPL and offer alternative license for businesses for money.

If the software takes the form of a library, that approach might work as intended, but AGPL does not forbid commercial use in general. To copy from [0]:

    The basic obligations of the AGPL which set it apart from other licenses
    are as follows:

    • Any derivative works of AGPL-licensed software must also use the AGPL.
    • Any users of such software are entitled to the source code under the
      terms of the AGPL, including users accessing it over the network such as
      with their web browser or via an API or internet protocol.

    If you’re using AGPL-licensed software like a database engine or my own
    AGPL-licensed works, and you haven’t made any changes to the source code,
    all you have to do is provide a link to the upstream source code somewhere,
    and if users ask for it, direct them there. If you have modified the
    software, you simply have to publish your modifications.

[0] https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html

(Usual disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, etc.)

> open source for non-commercial use

A licence which specifically forbids commercial use is by definition not an Open Source licence. This topic turns up a lot, here's a good bit of writing on it. [0] (Such a licence would also fail to qualify as a Free Software licence.)

[0] https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9806/