Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

As someone who recently built an open source crm (iceburg.ca - Laravel / Vue) I think your choice of license is very limiting. Limiting how the crm can be used will limit the number of users and handicap yourself. Focus on a great crm first and don't worry about others copying you and providing a saas solution better than yours. The more people using your crm is more important than preventing others from making money.

I debated whether to use your license because other crms like SuiteCRM are. I quickly discovered getting others interested enough to host their own saas platforms using my crm framework means more user interest in your crm. The hardest part is getting users to try your crm. That's what you want, not to try to capture imagined lost profit on saas hosting. Then with scale you can create a marketplace of addons and widgets that can capture the real profit center



I really like the metadata-driven approach of Iceburg, great work.

I don't have a strong opinion on licensing. We were setup as MIT until last week and ahead of this launch I thought that if for whatever reason we were moving to a more restrictive licence post-launch it could feel like we've been lying to the community. So we decided to adopt a more conservative approach to avoid making promises we couldn't hold later on. If people come to us with projects where this license is a blocker, we'd me happy to discuss and grant exceptions.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: