Self-hosted Elixir Application with Cloud Option

Questions / Help
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Hi everyone,

I’m developing an open-source software in Elixir. It’s designed to be self-hosted and free to use. However, I’d like to keep the option open to provide a paid cloud-hosted version in the future.

My main concern is ensuring that no one else can start offering their own cloud-hosted version of my software. I’m exploring the best way to achieve this (Right now I’m using AGPL) and would appreciate any advice. Some questions I have:

  • What license would best protect my rights in this scenario?
  • Are there creative ways to balance the freedom of open source with maintaining control over cloud-hosted deployments?

Also, has anyone here built a cloud-hosted version of a self-hosted Elixir application? I’d love to hear your experiences, especially any lessons learned around scalability, deployment, and user management.

Ps.
I’m using ash

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Elastic uses SSPL and is triple-licensing with their own license + AGPLv3.

Source.

3

AGPL do not prevent anyone from running their own cloud service running your software. It cannot prevent such use as otherwise it could not be FSF approved license (it cannot discriminate about a field of endeavour).

Beware that such licensing limitation will make this software not open (by OSI definition) nor free (by FSF definition).