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.
You’re on the open-source community, of course we’ll be biased in favour of open source. One thing to point out is that open-source and closed source are both pretty broad categories that cover several licenses. Source available means people can see the code, but there are restrictions to how they can use it. Is there a specific thing you don’t want people to do with your code? Do you not want them to edit it for example? Or you’re fine with them editing it, but not for commercial purpose ? Any restriction of this type will make it source-available. If you’re fine with them doing anything, it’s open source. If you want them to mention somewhere that their code is based on yours, it’s still open source. And if you want any code made by editing yours to also be open source, that’s still open source (that’s the idea of the GPL). But other restrictions might make it not fit that category.
I personally usually default to the GPL3, I’m fine with people doing anything with my code except making it non-open source. Well “my code”… It might be a bit presumptious of me, I’m not really a programmer, I’ve just made a few small and not very useful things. There may be legitimate reasons for not wanting your code to be open source sometimes, but for me the stakes have always been low.
As for whether using Github creates an expectation for Open-Source… Not so much at this point. It’s very used by the Open-Source community, but not only. Plus, it’s not really open-source itself, so the most purist prefer other git platforms like git-lab, forgejo or source-hut.
My main restriction is redistribution — people can read and modify the code for personal use. Since the default with no license is already “all rights reserved”, this project is mostly a test for me. I’m also cautious about someone copying or commercializing it, so I’m treating this as a learning exercise about licensing and distribution.
Yeah, that’d mean you need some type of source accessible license. Not sure which specific one tho, you’ll have to look deeper into it’