Curious with why you went for an Apache license. Aren’t you worried about copy-cat services? Or does the OSS version lack the scaling/distributed features that would be more difficult to replicate? I think that was ES’s fatal mistake and their licensing games are unlikely to pan out.
The Coral Project [0] (commenting platform used on Washington Post, New York Times, The Verge) uses an Apache 2.0 license [1]. Which doesn't seem to have prevented it from raking in big SaaS customers.
A lot of people worry about copy-cat services, but it's kind of rare that someone will be able to compete with you as the original in hosting your own service as well as you can. Especially when you consider support and maintenance requirements of a new product you aren't personally developing.
I could see copy-cat services being more of an issue in the late stage of a product though? When everyone knows lots about how to stand it up and use it?
> I could see copy-cat services being more of an issue in the late stage of a product though? When everyone knows lots about how to stand it up and use it?
The concern isn't random small companies. The concern is the big cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google. And you are right, they aren't going build out a hosted version of your product until there is enough traction. But at that point, customers might indeed trust them more than you to run your own software! Redis and Elastic ran into this problem for example.
The most likely scenario though - is never getting traction - so anything to improve traction such as permissive licensing is probably a better tradeoff.
