Most of the freak out I have seen I interpret as: “license says we can’t use it while competing with you but that has no real definition”
To me, it seems like an acceptable license, especially since development is happening on GitHub and they take PRs. Also the feature in the license where it reverts back to MPL after 4y is a nice security against the company doing anything else crazy restrictive - as you can plan on falling back to that version as a nuclear option.
Personally, I find non-commercial, source-available licenses consistent with the community-driven aspect of open-source and less restrictive than more aggressive copy-left licenses like GPL. I find that it allows persons, groups, and corporations to pursue additional business models other than support/services to monetize their work while still ensuring that individuals in the community are able to benefit from the work the sponsor and others are doing.
I understand the concerns this raises especially for the use of open-source tools in the commercial space and hope these source-available licenses are used sparingly and strategically (like in situations like Elastic where Amazon was profiting off Elastic while competing with them and ultimately not contributing back to the project which put the project’s funding at risk)
I tend to prefer the GPL because I don’t know what good “source available” does for anyone beyond an audit. If I want to have someone fix a bug - I probably can’t with “source available”, and the overhead in figuring out if something is a use not liked by the vendor is an unnecessary headache for me.
So… in this case, for me I’d treat a no-commercial use, source available, as functionally the same as a proprietary license like Microsofts.
I take it you’re responding from the lens of using this software in a corporate setting? Otherwise there is functionally no difference in the license vs OSI-compatible open-source licenses unless I’m missing something big which very well could be the case
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