Hey, looking for some advice! I’ve been chipping away (mostly solo) for a while on a FoC-related project for people with disabilities, based on some personal connections to the issues we’re solving & frustrations with available technology. The core concepts have benefited a lot from gleanings from this chat and others in this space, and it looks like we (me + cofounder) have a good shot to take it from prototype to production aided by NSF grant funding. The big question right now is we’re considering taking it in a much more open source direction for the next phase, with the hypothesis that this will be a better bet for the long term success & growth of our project (not just the “right thing to do”). If anyone has experience you think would inform this decision - open source maintenance/community development, commercialization models, massive flameouts, etc - let me know if you’d be up for a chat to either egg me on or try & talk me out of it. 🙂 Many thanks!

Been following Sentry and InfluxDB open source journey. • As of InfluxDB - this talk of their CTO Paul was quite informative and well worth listening to. • As for Sentry - https://blog.sentry.io/2019/11/06/relicensing-sentry and https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/blob/master/LICENSE . Don’t have any experience myself on the topic, just was considering such path for few projects, so Influx and Sentry just got my attention as having successfully found their ways with open source commercials.

Andy Matuschak’s Orbit is taking a unique licensing approach that might be of interest: https://github.com/andymatuschak/orbit#license. Some parts are open from the start, others discourage corporate usage for a period before becoming open as well.

Some great material I hadn’t seen before - especially the “vesting” idea with the BSL. Thanks for the links! It’s not exactly a solution in itself, but I recently discovered sponsorware and it’s a nifty solution to a tension I’ve felt before. Another vesting variant (over sponsors not time). https://calebporzio.com/sponsorware