I don’t think VC-backed startups do that. They open source code because open source materially benefits adoption and mindshare, which grows the potential market for services, and that’s how they end up with big valuations selling premium services on top of their open source core.

Of course, sometimes they get mad that this also enables other people to sell premium services on top of the open source core, and sometimes those other people can make more money because they are major incumbents that integrate other offerrings. But that doesn’t mean the startup would have been better or grown faster or sold more of its own services if it hadn’t been open source.

It also doesn’t mean closing-up negates that competition: once the value of the product is proven, the major incumbents also have had proven for them the potential value of funding a fork with its own dedicated team, which can reap the community reach benefits of open source and compete with the relative upstarts now-proprietary offering.

This is a pretty important point. That AWS can make something a big business does not mean a small startup could have done the same without AWS.

And this is the core of the issue I think: people use Apache and MIT licenses by default without thinking two seconds about the consequences. It's just the default on GitHub.

Elastic is derived from Apache Lucene, it’s unclear if anyone involved in its’ development could legally have made it more restrictive, though they apparently are trying to.

It seems like a lot of us perhaps rushed to discussion before reading this article, which is about Amazon forking ElasticSearch so that an OSS version would remain available.

Honestly, this is a shitty move by Elastic and I’ll be advocating against new uses of it, though /because reasons/, I doubt this will come up for me in the near future. ;)

> Elastic is derived from Apache Lucene, it’s unclear if anyone involved in its’ development could legally have made it more restrictive, though they apparently are trying to.

Actually, you can totally use Apache 2.0 code as your kernel and then make the whole thing a restrictive license. In fact, that's why we're having this discussion right now. Elastic just made their Elasticsearch/Kibana codebases entirely proprietary, even though they rely on Apache 2.0 Lucene as their kernel. Which to be clear is totally fine, I'm just pointing out the obvious.

What are better alternative licenses that also wouldn't deter contributors?

So you're looking for a license that would give you all the benefits but still encourage people to contribute - so only you get their work for free?

Yes and no. I think I remember hearing about a license before that would require anybody that forks your project to create a PR for any changes they make.

While this wouldn't prevent a company from using your project, but it would at least force them to pass on any of their changes.

> While this wouldn't prevent a company from using your project...

...it would deter them, which is what your original question was asking. Preventing and deterring are two completely different things.

I am not sure that there are, but that's also the point. Open source software does not guarantee or even offer a business model. If you want to license your project with a "do what you want, no warranty" license that is attractive to contributors, you cannot also add a clause to limit something.