I am building a SaaS application and I would like to be able to publish the source code while retaining commercial rights to the application. I did some research and it seems that most popular licenses are not structured to fit this model. I realize this kind of license may not fit with the general spirit of open source, but the alternative for most SaaS companies is that their primary code base is closed source. I am not convinced that has be the case. Why couldn't an app like Github or Basecamp be open source? Why couldn't community members submit pull requests and be paid for their work? There may be valid reasons this model won't work, but I am interested in exploring this further and hearing opinions
- Code can be freely distributed
- Code can be modified without consent
- Code can be run on a personal machine for personal use
- Code cannot be used for commercial purposes, for the benefit of a commercial entity, or to directly compete with the copyright owner ("the company")
- Changes, patches, and features can be submitted to the company and commiters have a right to be paid for their work (does this need to be in the license?)
- Community submitted code that has been paid for and accepted retains the same license and copyright as the rest of the code base.
- In the event the the company dissolves, the license automatically reverts to a standard open source license (MIT or GPL)
- In the event the company is acquired then .... ? (not really sure what to do here)
- How would this affect the possible acquisition of the company?
- How would this affect investors? Would they be less interested in the company?
I need something like this for SMSMyBus... I'm about to pull it out of the HackingMadison group because I'm going to start charging for the various services in some cases.