story
Here's our post that explains our licensing in detail: https://blog.getumbrel.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about...
Yes, your license means that individual users can make little patches to customize the product to their needs, and even share these customizations with other users. That's great!
But the license effectively prohibits borrowing code from your codebase for use in other projects, meaning your code does not become part of the aether of Open Source code that anyone can build upon. That's a very important part of what it means to be "Open Source".
It also effectively prevents any large-scale modification or forking effort, since maintaining patches as the underlying codebase evolves is a hard job, and the license prohibits people from funding such effort. If users want timely security updates, they will need to stick close to your version of the codebase. So the lock-in is there.
Again, this is all a perfectly justified direction for you to take. I don't blame you at all, and I definitely understand that it's Amazon's fault that we cannot have nice things. But it's not Open Source.
On a tangentially-related note, a little tip: You have defined all noncommercial organizations -- including education, public research, and government -- as being permitted users. That may be dangerous. I was the founder of Sandstorm, and these organizations were exactly the ones most interested in paying for our product -- literally the only big sales we ever made were a couple universities, a big research org, and a government. Despite being non-profit, these orgs have lots of money and a need for self-hosting.
Re noncommercial organizations being permitted users, this was a conscious decision on our part. We're purposefully building Umbrel purely for consumers, and don't plan to serve any commercial or noncommercial organizations. We want to align our incentives directly with consumers instead of enterprises, and this is purely to help us focus on building for the user-base that excites us the most.
I'm a big fan of Sandstorm btw. It was way ahead of its time.
Despite a lot of noise on HN, we had only a few hundred signups for our paid hosting service. We built super-scalable hosting tech but it turned out we could have hosted them on a single big VM all along... oops.
I think the problem is that the apps, while functional, weren't competitive with their SaaS competitors, and so the only reason to use the hosting service was if you really cared about the Open Source aspect. Maybe if we had a killer app that was actually better than any SaaS alternative, we could have gotten somewhere? But we never found that.
Meanwhile, we got a lot of feedback from people working at big orgs that were forced to self-host for regulatory reasons. Such orgs are terribly served by the current software market, since they can essentially only buy software from companies that specialize in building regulated software, and those companies generally build software that is expensive and terrible.
Real-time collaboration essentially didn't exist in this market, making our apps actually better than what these organizations had! But we had absolutely no expertise in selling to orgs like this, and we never really figured it out. We should have hired for it much earlier, or maybe even brought on another co-founder with enterprise sales experience.
So, we were unable to get anywhere before investors pulled the plug.
With that said, I always say you should not trust anyone's advice. Your story is different and you need to do what makes intuitive sense to you. If your intuition is right, you succeed. But you certainly can't succeed by going against your own intuition, so if someone says something that doesn't make intuitive sense to you, ignore it.
Especially when one of the VC firms that funds your project is also the one behind formulation of the PolyForm set of licenses, I'd imagine. At least, PolyForm is better, in some sense, than fully closed source projects built atop other MIT/BSD/Apache licensed projects (say, the V8 JavaScript engine ;), and never shared.
The only reason I dislike non-OSI approved licenses are, the "users" of such licenses want to have their cake and eat it too: As in, they want to project open source ethos while also denying the advantages/rights otherwise afforded by Open Source, as defined by the OSI.
Imo, source-available licenses are justified only when companies using it are honest about their intentions and forthcoming about the license's limitations. Nothing specific on Umbrel, but generally, misdirection by firms insistent on source-available licenses as being some convenient 'middle-ground' is off-putting, to say the least!
I've followed Umbrel since I first stumbled upon it in August 2020, and of course, I'd have liked them to be open-source (since I don't believe software is their core advantage, rather their brand is; but then again, what do I know): https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel/issues/291#issuecomment-...
That said, Umbrel already brings a lot to the table... its licensing is a predictable HN distraction from discussion on its true potential.
These are all rights I have with Open Source software that is denied by your non-commercial license. Reading your blog post, you seem to not understand Open Source nor do you seem to understand the implications of your own license very well.
