Interesting license choice, modified MIT it seems, with this additional clause:<p>> No licensee or downstream recipient may use the Software (including any modified or derivative versions) to directly compete with the original Licensor by offering it to third parties as a hosted, managed, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product or cloud service where the primary value of the service is the functionality of the Software itself.<p>Doesn't that kind of conflict with the "including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software" part of regular MIT, which your custom license also includes for some reason?<p>I think you might be better of with just not trying to do it "kind of open source but also not" and just say "Copyright 2026 Sandgarden.com" or whatever, instead of the mix of proprietary and open source. Then you get 100% "full control" over what people can do with the source, and don't have to worry about anything when it comes to licensing :)
author here! the decision was mine; if anything, the senior leadership was fine with an unencumbered open-source license. What <i>I</i> didn't want was someone using it to make a business out of this tool without me in the mix.<p>In a sense, a futile effort; because if you reverse engineer a nlspec and rebuild it, then you can have it with any license you may want.
I wasn't doubting it wasn't you making the decision! :)<p>I was more curious why go with modifying a FOSS license (which clearly isn't the right choice if you want to prevent others from doing whatever with it) instead of just straight up keeping full copyright to yourself/the company and a "regular" license?<p>Then you get exactly what you want, without also sending double-messages about that people can do whatever they want, which is what you're trying to prevent.
He said why, he wanted to open source it with the mentioned exception.<p>I think there are also licenses that do that, and revert to full MIT after some time, but the author decided to roll their own.<p>What’s the problem with that? He can license it however he wants and the reason he mentions is perfectly valid tbh