I’m a full time engineer, working on OSS for more than a decade.

As much as I love open-souce, I get the point that there are a bunch of freeloaders using stuff and not contributing back.

If you don't want "free"loaders using your software why is it "free" in the first place?

By any chance are you familiar with Little Free Library (https://littlefreelibrary.org/), those public boxes for people to take or leave books? How would you feel if someone took ALL the books, repeatedly, and then sold them? Would you just shrug and say "well that's totally fine, why is it free in the first place?"

This behavior is antisocial, and completely destroys the offering/concept for everyone.

I have a bootstrapped software company with an open-core product. Meanwhile, a VC-backed startup that has raised over $100m of funding decided to use one of my core open source libraries (which they haven't contributed to in any way) for a critical component of their commercial product, which also overlaps with my product's functionality in some ways.

In response, I eventually made the difficult decision to archive that library's repo and moved its functionality into my main product in a way that prevented external use. So then this startup created a hostile fork of my library, and started to implement functionality that is only present in my own commercial product.

After that, I had to waste several months of unpaid time just to make their fork of my own library no longer easily compatible with recent versions of my own product. Some time later, finally the startup decided to abandon use of my library altogether and wrote their own similar library (which was undoubtedly much easier for them, being able to see all the edge cases my library already handled).

My lesson from all this: I will never create another new large open source product ever again. Too many sociopaths out there for the system to work at all. If I ever decide to make something source-available, I will consider BSL.

And before someone says "why not AGPL?", it is because many companies don't touch AGPL software with a ten-foot pole. My sense is that adopting AGPL for a brand new product typically causes the product to be dead on arrival. That said, I would honestly love to be wrong here.

If there are a lot of AGPL open core / commercial FOSS companies that have been successful, please share examples, I say this genuinely and without snark.

Yes, you chose the wrong license without understanding its implications.

> My sense is that adopting AGPL for a brand new product typically causes the product to be dead on arrival.

It may hinder adoption (in the corporate world) but not contribution to the source. And if you want to promote the spirit of opensource and make money too, dual licensing with xGPL is the best way to go. MySQL is a successful example of this licensing and business model.

It's pretty telling that you listed only a single example product, and one which was first released twenty-eight years ago, and also one which raised venture capital.

Just because dual-licensing has been successful in a very limited number of exceptional situations, does not mean that it is a reproducible path towards building a sustainable software business.

Also keep in mind:

* MySQL hasn't been an independent business for over 15 years. AFAIK there is no public information on its revenue or profitability.

* Much of Oracle's recent work on the product has been on MySQL Heatwave, which is only available as a managed service.

* Most MySQL Community Edition commits come from Oracle.

* Meanwhile the company behind MariaDB, arguably a more "open" fork of MySQL, is having financial problems and may well end up having its stock de-listed soon.

* The non-open-source Business Source License was originally created by MariaDB for their MaxScale product. The license's existence is fully backed by Monty Widenius, original creator of MySQL.

To be clear, I'm not saying any of the above to criticize Oracle or MariaDB. Rather, just pointing out that a general statement of "dual licensing with xGPL is the best way to go" is not really backed by the facts on the ground.

I must ask, do you run a commercial open source business yourself?

- MariaDB: https://mariadb.com/products/community-server/

- Percona Server for MySQL: https://www.percona.com/software/mysql-database/percona-serv...

Other additional examples of successfully commercialised xGPL products with different business models:

- Red Hat Linux: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...

- QT: https://www.qt.io/licensing/

- Ghostscript: https://www.ghostscript.com/licensing/index.html

- WordPress: https://wordpress.com/ (based on https://wordpress.org/ )

- Buskill (hardware): https://www.buskill.in/

- Moodle: https://moodle.com/ (based on https://moodle.org/)

- ProtonMail: https://proton.me/mail (based on https://github.com/ProtonMail )

- Tutanota: https://tutanota.com/ (based on https://github.com/tutao/tutanota/ )

- Dada Mail: https://www.dadamailproject.com/

- Dietlibc: https://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/

The commercial success of a product totally depends on the business model you come up with, whatever be its opensource (or not) license.

Corporates have a vested interest in promoting the propaganda that only a non-xGPL opensource license can be commercialised successfully simply because they cannot freely steal the source code of a competing xGPL licensed software.

The real value of an FSF license, like the AGPL, is that it is designed to protect the copyright holders, and its users, "right to repair". And thus, it cannot be closed source by anyone (apart from the original copyright holders) once released under the said license (even if future versions are closed source, the old version under xGPL remain opensource perpetually). Other open source license (that are less stringent) are prioritised to increase developer contribution. Source code under such license can thus be closed-source even from the original copyright holder.

But again, commercial success totally depends on the business model you come up with, irrespective of your license. The right license and the right business model will empower each other. Or cripple your business.