Iām trying to understand which licensing model makes the most sense for small personal tools ā not as products, but as experiments to learn how to distribute software before working on a larger project.
To explore this, I released a tiny utility as sourceāavailable rather than fully openāsource. The code is visible, but the license is restrictive. GitHub here works only as a landing page, not as a full FOSS repo.
Hereās the project Iām using as a test case (not promoting it ā just showing the model Iām experimenting with): https://github.com/Mietkiewski/MPomidoro
My goal isnāt to push the tool itself ā itās just a way to understand how people interpret these categories:
Is sourceāavailable meaningfully different from closedāsource?
Do you expect small tools to default to openāsource?
Does hosting something on GitHub imply a FOSS expectation?
For someone planning a larger ecosystem later, which model is the most reasonable starting point?
Iām genuinely trying to understand how openāsource communities see these distinctions before I commit to a longāterm direction.
For this project Iām mainly testing distribution models. My only restriction is redistribution ā people can read and modify the code for personal use. Iām also cautious about someone copying or commercializing it, so this is mostly a learning exercise for me.
Once you limit what kind of usage people can do with it (ie no commercial use) you are entering the source available section and not so much open source.
Usually in open source, when the creators are worried about commercial use, they use a license that enforces open sourcing any derived works, which means that any commercial use will only happen without any modification or with contributions to the community. The revenue model in such cases is usually tech support or an upstream closed source version.
For open source licenses you can checkout Open license helper
But what you are describing is either source available or closed source.
Right ā thatās why Iām calling it sourceāavailable. Iām mainly testing user behavior around distribution, not trying to define whatās āopenā or not.
What do you expect to learn from those so called tests? (no offence)
The big questions in closed vs open is that there are different scenarios :
for closed source -> less competitor -> more users -> more money -> more investment in the project -> better product.
for open source -> more users want to use it and contribute to it -> better software -> more users -> more potential for making money.
The problem is that for the outcomes you want to track (more money or better software). there are so many variable involved that influence those outcomes so itās hard to deduce that the license is improving the outcomes or making them worst.
Iām not trying to prove which license is better ā too many variables, like you said. Iām just testing how different models change user behavior: who clicks, who downloads, who ignores. Itās more about distribution patterns than software quality.
That is also a product of many variables (including software quality). maybe time to go back to the drawing board.