The O'Saasy License

I spent three days agonizing over a license.

Three days. For a legal document. While I could have been writing code.

But here's the thing: get this wrong, and everything else doesn't matter.

The nightmare scenario

Picture this: I spend two years building Brainz Lab. It gets popular. Then AWS announces "Amazon Recall"—my exact product, hosted on their infrastructure, free tier included.

They didn't steal my code. They didn't break any laws. MIT said they could do whatever they want. And they did.

This isn't hypothetical. It happened to MongoDB. To Elasticsearch. To Redis. The cloud giants took their open source projects and ate their lunch.

I lived through this struggle myself—building something only to watch larger players benefit from my work. And I saw other founders scramble to change licenses after the fact. The community backlash was brutal. "Bait and switch!" people screamed.

I'm not doing that. I'm picking the right license from day one.

Why not just go proprietary?

Easy solution, right? Keep the code closed. Charge for everything.

But I've been a developer for 13 years. I know how we evaluate tools. We don't fill out sales forms. We don't schedule demos. We clone repos and try things.

Proprietary means friction. Friction means nobody tries it. Nobody trying it means nobody buying it.

The best developer tools spread through word of mouth. "Hey, I tried this thing, it's pretty good." That only happens when the code is accessible.

The middle ground

Then I found the O'Saasy License. Basecamp and 37signals created it for Fizzy, their kanban project management tool. (O'Saasy = Open but not SaaSy.) It's exactly what I was looking for.

Here's the deal:

Do whatever you want. Use it, modify it, run a thousand instances. Fork it and customize it for your company. I don't care. Go wild.

Just don't resell it. Don't take my code and offer "Recall as a Service" to other companies. Don't compete with me using my own work.

That's it. One restriction. Everything else is fair game.

Will it hold up?

Honestly? I don't know.

The BSL, SSPL, and Elastic License have been tested in various ways. O'Saasy is based on their approaches. But I'm not a lawyer, and I haven't been sued yet.

What I do know: the intent is clear. Use it = great. Resell it = not okay. If someone violates that, the community will know, even if the courts take forever.

The reception

The O'Saasy license has its fans. "Finally, a license that makes sense for indie developers."

And its critics. "This isn't real open source. OSI wouldn't approve."

They're right—it's not OSI-approved open source. I'm okay with that. The OSI definition was written before cloud giants made a business of strip-mining open source projects.

Times change. Licenses should too.

The bet

I'm betting that developers care more about access than ideological purity.

I'm betting that "use it freely, just don't resell it" is a deal most people will happily accept.

I'm betting that transparency about the license from day one builds more trust than starting MIT and switching later.

We'll see if I'm right.

— Andres