Indie developers lack flexible source-available licensing options
🧭 worksocial problemSingle report ●●●●●
An indie developer and open-core founder reports that current open-source licenses force a binary choice between fully permissive licenses that allow AI scraping and SaaS wrapping, or keeping code entirely closed, leaving no middle ground for creators who want to share code with specific commercial boundaries.
What people do today
- Using standard MIT or Apache licenses
- Keeping source code closed
- Drafting bespoke custom licenses
🔧 Fix this
Ideas a builder, maker or community group could start on:
- A standardized modular license library that provides pre-vetted legal clauses for common restrictions like AI training or SaaS wrapping.
- A legal-tech platform that generates 'standardized' custom licenses that include a 'compatibility score' for corporate legal teams to review quickly.
- A community-driven registry of source-available license templates that are pre-approved by a consortium of tech-focused law firms.
Real voices
“indie devs and open-core founders struggling with them recently. When you release source-available code today, you often face a tough choice.”
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