The issue that I have with this license type is: what if there's some functionality that they have built that I would find useful, unrelated to their core business. Like, imagine that they have some tool to make generating UI components easier.
If I want to use a bit from their UI component generator in my commercial software, am I violating their license?
This is why real open source is so important to distinguish -- I don't want to have to worry about this sort of thing, let alone bring in lawyers to help me decide.
Don't get me wrong, or take this as ungrateful. I'm still glad it exists, and am really happy that this works as their business model. I think it is valuable to use as a learning tool (how did they go about solving x problem?), as well as valuable for use in other Open Source software. I hope more companies are able to use licenses like this in the future, to be totally honest. I just want it to be distinguished from true Open Source software.
> If I want to use a bit from their UI component generator in my commercial software, am I violating their license?
It depends on the license. Based on what I have read about the cockroachdb, SSPL (mongo) it seems that you can do that (but I am not sure about it, someone more knowledgable might be able to verify it).
> This is why real open source is so important to distinguish
Consider another case then. You are making a proprietary software that you might or might not be planning to sell and you get the ui generator from an open source software. Are you free to do that?
Truth is that just like above the answer is "it depends on the license". GPL will not let you do it while MIT will. LGPL will let you do it if you make the ui generator a library that you dynamically link with and publish your changes to it, while MPL... I have no idea, I think it works on a per-file bases.
If I want to use a bit from their UI component generator in my commercial software, am I violating their license?
This is why real open source is so important to distinguish -- I don't want to have to worry about this sort of thing, let alone bring in lawyers to help me decide.
Don't get me wrong, or take this as ungrateful. I'm still glad it exists, and am really happy that this works as their business model. I think it is valuable to use as a learning tool (how did they go about solving x problem?), as well as valuable for use in other Open Source software. I hope more companies are able to use licenses like this in the future, to be totally honest. I just want it to be distinguished from true Open Source software.