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.
Once you limit what kind of usage people can do with it (ie no commercial use) you are entering the source available section and not so much open source.
Usually in open source, when the creators are worried about commercial use, they use a license that enforces open sourcing any derived works, which means that any commercial use will only happen without any modification or with contributions to the community. The revenue model in such cases is usually tech support or an upstream closed source version.
For open source licenses you can checkout Open license helper
But what you are describing is either source available or closed source.