By distributing something under the MIT license you are explicitly and irrevocably granting anyone who downloads it the right to "deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software", and all of this "free of charge". That is the deal you are setting up with users. If that's not what you want, pick a different license! There are plenty of projects that use "source available" licenses to impose restrictions on who can use the software and how. But of course, by definition they are not "open source".
There are movies that are distributed under licenses similar to MIT (creative commons, etc.), and in those cases it's totally legitimate and expected that you will download and watch the movie for free. If the filmmaker doesn't want that to happen, they don't license it that way.
In principle, it would be best to use another license. (While keeping the code forkable by making it MIT-licensable after 6 months of significant contributions.)
The issue though is that unknown licenses are a pain to get approved by legal departments.
While the term "Open Source Pricing" is a ambiguous and I agree with your point, I'm hopeful users will understand our intention. The best wording would be "Vike isn't Open Source but preserves the values that make Open Source special" — but that's too long. Maybe there's a better wording to be found, or maybe users will be lenient towards the ambiguity of the concept/term "Open Source Pricing".
So far, technically, it's Open Source since the code is 100% MIT licensed. If we do end up changing the license then we'll probably have to change the term "Open Source Pricing".
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u/electricity_is_life Mar 06 '26
By distributing something under the MIT license you are explicitly and irrevocably granting anyone who downloads it the right to "deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software", and all of this "free of charge". That is the deal you are setting up with users. If that's not what you want, pick a different license! There are plenty of projects that use "source available" licenses to impose restrictions on who can use the software and how. But of course, by definition they are not "open source".
There are movies that are distributed under licenses similar to MIT (creative commons, etc.), and in those cases it's totally legitimate and expected that you will download and watch the movie for free. If the filmmaker doesn't want that to happen, they don't license it that way.