Best non-commercial source-available license?

Question

I created a moderately successful documentation tooling project in my 20s when I had more time and enthusiasm. It has been 13 years and the code base needs some love.I don't have the enthusiasm that I used to and additionally some large (multi-million dollar) companies are using it and I don't know how to go about getting it properly funded. I'm only interested in doing the hard work to improve the code base and execution performance if it is funded.I have created an Open Collective but lack the understanding of how to go about getting companies to contribute to it.My current thought it to fork off and do the work in a non-commercial, source-available licensed code base with an optional paid commercial usage approach but I feel like that isn't generally a well recognised option and I'm not sure why.I love and respect open source in many ways but my attitudes to it have changed and I wish it was much more standard for maintainers to be funded but I struggle to know the best way forward.Does anyone have recommendations on the non-commercial, source-available approach?

janober · Accepted Answer

We at n8n created the Sustainable Use License (https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/packages/cli/LICEN...) and started https://faircode.io/ which could be interesting for you to look at. It is based on the amazing Elastic License 2.0 (https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license) which you should also check out. Apart from that are there multiple great licenses here: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/
All are obviously not OSI approved.
Hope that is helpful!

gtirloni · Answer

"source-available" usually means you don't want contributions and forks, is that the case?
Are you getting anything by making the source available? Maybe you should make it proprietary.
There are some licenses like the LGPL which will forbid some companies to bundling your software in some ways. This license is forbidden at Google, as an example.
Which brings me to the topic of open source licenses and corporations. If you're hoping some big company will use and sponsor your project, they usually have strict license requirements (anything "custom" or outside the OSI-approved list will need extra approvals internally).

brudgers · Answer

Talk to your lawyer.If you don't have a lawyer, your choice of license doesn't make any practical difference in terms of whether or not a bad actor will violate the license terms.I mean there's no GNU enforcement agency, if you license something GNU you can take a violation to court but nobody else will. And if someone else does, it will probably be thrown out for lack of standing.Or to put it another way, the best license is the one you are interested in enforcing. If you are not interested in enforcing any license, then CC0. Otherwise, talk to your lawyer.