I’m trying to understand which licensing model makes the most sense for small personal tools — not as products, but as experiments to learn how to distribute software before working on a larger project.

To explore this, I released a tiny utility as source‑available rather than fully open‑source. The code is visible, but the license is restrictive. GitHub here works only as a landing page, not as a full FOSS repo.

Here’s the project I’m using as a test case (not promoting it — just showing the model I’m experimenting with): https://github.com/Mietkiewski/MPomidoro

My goal isn’t to push the tool itself — it’s just a way to understand how people interpret these categories:

Is source‑available meaningfully different from closed‑source?

Do you expect small tools to default to open‑source?

Does hosting something on GitHub imply a FOSS expectation?

For someone planning a larger ecosystem later, which model is the most reasonable starting point?

I’m genuinely trying to understand how open‑source communities see these distinctions before I commit to a long‑term direction.

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[–] francisco_1844@discuss.online 3 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

If you have any thoughts of making any money of the code that may be a reason to give the license some thought. Anything else, these days, is just a LLM away from getting re-written regardless of whatever license you use. For example there is a service that takes any code, uses one agent to create requirements and another to use those requirements to create a comparable program; the claim is that the second agent did not "steal" your code since it purely worked off requirements. Sure, it likely won't be as good, but it allows someone to take a significant part of your code for themselves. That was, more or less, always there in the past is just that now is near trivial to do.

Also, there are projects that are just fake open source. Like a project I saw yesterday with a restrictive license, but then has a CLA.

AGPL restrictive copyleft license -- good
CLA (Contributor License Agreement) — a legal agreement where you grant the project maintainers additional rights over your contribution, often including the right to relicense it under different terms -- not good

So, that project at first sight appears like it is open, but because of the CLA the authors may just take whatever contributions you do to the project and then change it's license.