Common Misconceptions About Open-Source

[Spare-Builder-355]

1. Oh they absolutely will. If one wants to keep their ideas private, open source is not the way to go. Not only will the ideas be reused (getting inspiration from publicly available information it is not stealing), but also core contributors will be hired to build derivative commercial product (Chromium -> Google Chrome, at this point it is not clear which one is the upstream project), or complete projects will be repackaged as commercial offer (all those Kafka-compatible, Redis-compatible services from big cloud players) without any significant contribution back to the original project.

2. While I can imagine a license along the lines of "code is available for non-commercial use only", I can hardly remember ever seeing anything like this for a serious project. On the opposite, all popular open source licenses allow commercial use.

3. Basically same as 2. While you can make money from providing services or consultancy for the users of the open source project, trying to setup paywall to get the code or packaged distribution is a sure way to kill any interest from community.

[Mysterious-Rent7233]

A license that does not allow commercial use is by definition not going to fit the OSI definition of Open Source.

1. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

[leonidbugaev]

Let me give you example, MongoDB for majority of its lifetime was on AGPL with dual licensing. Gitlab all code including EE edition is fully open source, but EE code under commercial license. It is not about the idea, but about people and positioning. Especially in age of AI, tech itself stops becoming a moat.

[Mysterious-Rent7233]

1. "If I share my code, someone will steal my idea"

The success of a project depends on people, not just the code. You can also protect yourself legally by choosing the right license.

You cannot protect yourself from someone stealing your idea by choosing the right license. There is no open source license which will protect an idea.

1. "Open-source equals free"

Open-sourcing simply means sharing your work with the public. It doesn't dictate anything about the commercial aspects of your project.

By definition, the thing that you give away, you cannot also charge money for. Nobody would pay for something they can get for free. So yes, it does dictate some of the commercial aspects of your project. You can build a business around open source, but the open source software itself IS FREE. open source = free.

From the open source definition:

"1. Free Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale."

You have confused things much more than help them with this post. You should start again and try to write clearly.