Honest question, how is it possible to be viable as a business and offer your code as MPL (Convoy) or MIT (Svix)? I love open source but I would expect a stronger license like GPL to be used, why did we settle on very permissive license as the default? I get the brand is protected but is that really enough? I am legit curious to hear the founders' take on that.
I'll try to answer this from a consumer point of view. It makes a ton of sense for a startup to do this. As a potential client of this, I may end up liking it a lot but worry if this company is going to be around in a year. Open source means that if I HAD to, I can run it myself. That said, our company would rather not run it ourselves. Managed services, SaaS, etc. are ideal for us. So being more permissive and a managed service/SaaS is the best combination for us looking at it as a potential customer. If this gets super popular, it's likely that the existing customers won't want to switch even if someone else offers it.
What we care deeply about today is simplifying and democrastising webhooks with Convoy. Under the MPL 2.0 License as I understand it, any modifications to Convoy must be made open-source as well which helps us reach our initial goal.
On building a viable business, we currently run a managed infrastructure, where users pay for our infrastructure and other collaborative features (team membership, rbac etc) to make it easier to work with the core.
Nevertheless, we are open to transitioning to a stricter license in the future that restricts other cloud platforms from competing with us with our software.
IIRC MPL doesn't require all modifications to be open source, just the ones that modify existing files in the project. So I could add functions in a proprietary file, then add some small open source parts that call those proprietary functions.
It's a great question, and there's no one definitive answer. Some context: I've been an open source developer for all my life, my previous business was also open source, and I spoke with a lot of people over the last year about the right license for us.
The main choices are: copyleft like AGPL (you want AGPL, not GPL for server applications), permissive like MIT (which we chose[0]), or so called "fair-code" which are the not-quite-open-source variants like the SSPL.
While AGPL and SSPL are "better for business", MIT is more aligned with our mission, and is better for fostering a community. You can read more about the thinking on our Show HN[1].
Either way though, all of what the stricter licenses do is make it harder for competitors to use your code in their own service. Which is important, but not the end of the world as competitors can always just copy your API, landing page, and everything else.
