I've been building a platform that is going to make DevOps work on any cloud 10x easier and faster, meaning you either won't need to deal with DevOps at all or you will do only the tiny part which is really specific to you.<p>I've managed to build a lot of the features I wanted and now I want to make it open-source/code available.<p>My question is what license is the best? Can I start with CC and move to MIT later?<p>https://github.com/utopiops/utopiops
> Can I start with CC and move to MIT later?<p>If it's all your own code, you can give it to whoever you want under whatever license suits you at the time.<p>If you're open sourcing it to try and encourage contributions from other people though, you need to think about whether you are going to need to get a contributor agreement to assign IP/copyright to you (or some legal entity crated around the software) if you ever want to do that down the track.<p>Another thing to consider is what the impact of Amazon packaging up or forking your project and selling it "as a service" without contributing anything back to the project? Do you need to investigate one of the no longer "open source" licences like Mongo/Redis have done to restrict them from doing that?<p>In my opinion (and knowing nothing about your project or goals) depending on your philosophy, you either go "full software freedom purity" and GPL it (which will mean places like Google will avoid it like the plague), or you go maximal freedom wit5h MIT/BSD. (Or possibly even dual licence like Perl which lets you choose between either Artistic Lic else or GPL)
AGPL will protect you, your users in the future and prevent companies like Amazon from profiting from your hard work and give nothing back to the community.<p>See what happened to elastic search:<p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/opinion/Elastic-vs-AWS-highlights-open-source-monetization-dilemma" rel="nofollow">https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/opinion/Elas...</a>
For standalone tools that people use in their workflows without linking them to their own code (A)GPL is mostly fine. If it's something that should be used as a library I'd use a more permissive license like BSD-3 or Apache 2.0, as otherwise you'll have adoption problems especially for larger enterprises that use proper open-source license management tools (as those will flag GPL licenses as high risk).<p>That said think of licensing as one part of your open-source strategy. From my experience licenses won't keep your competitors from copying your code or circumventing your license terms. The best thing is still to keep your most business-critical code closed-source.
Do you want the widest possible usage of it, including companies taking it and reselling it? Then MIT might work.<p>Do you want it to only be used and not sold? Probably AGPL or something.<p>Do you want to sell it also? Then AGPL with a separate commercial license for those who want to pay.