I think, rather than looking at the Source First license as something that’s “a replacement for OSI Open Source but less free” it’s more useful to see it as “a replacement for closed source commercial licenses but radically more open”.
Open source has created some really great backend software and developer tooling, but somehow it’s not great at making nice consumer-friendly client side apps. When you look at the best apps, even the ones like Chrome that use open licenses, they are created by a relatively closed group of developers funded by a for-profit company.
The Source First movement is aiming to provide a way for that kind of closed focused team to be more open with their users. I don’t imagine that many Source First projects are going to be looking for lots of community contributions, and that’s ok - the closed source apps don’t do this either and they seem to get along fine.
My gut reaction to the license was exactly OP's -- it felt shady and sleazy.
Then my logic kicked in and I came to the same conclusion you did -- it's not open source, but source-available means people can audit that it's honest. That's a huge win over closed-source, especially for something privacy-focused.
I think the gut feeling comes from a long history of projects using source-available licenses in shady ways. The brain pattern-matches.
That would be good to address upfront. Simply stating "not open source, but source-auditable" might help address this.
Another good thing would be to post the price upfront. Right now, it requires an email to get to which is an antipattern.
Open source has created some really great backend software and developer tooling, but somehow it’s not great at making nice consumer-friendly client side apps. When you look at the best apps, even the ones like Chrome that use open licenses, they are created by a relatively closed group of developers funded by a for-profit company.
The Source First movement is aiming to provide a way for that kind of closed focused team to be more open with their users. I don’t imagine that many Source First projects are going to be looking for lots of community contributions, and that’s ok - the closed source apps don’t do this either and they seem to get along fine.