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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/chimbori on 2026-02-25 13:34:16+00:00.
Most of my previous projects have also been licensed as Apache 2.0, and gained sufficient popularity & usage (a Chrome extension, a Kotlin library, and a few others).
For my latest project, I started with AGPL 3.0, with the intention that personal usage & smaller companies (i.e. those without Legal departments that would advise them against AGPL 3.0) would be able to use it for free in perpetuity, but larger companies would be good candidates for a paid proprietary license.
A few weeks in, I’ve reversed that stance. For smaller projects like this one, it probably makes more sense to make it all Apache 2.0 (or MIT or BSD), since that opens the doors wide open to whoever wants to use it.
We’ve heard (negatively) of a lot of projects that started off as Apache 2.0, and then ended up becoming proprietary.
Wondering if folks have experiences to share about starting off with a viral GPL-ish license, and then opening it up subsequently, and how that impacted adoption.
(If you’re curious about the specific project, it’s a self-hosted tool to automatically generate OpenGraph images from templates. Think of it as the open-source version of SaaS tools like Bannerbear, RenderForm, and others).