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> I would consider what kind of licensing you want to do, I would also consider goals in doing this. One huge benefit of an open source SaaS offering is the freedom to take control of what you're getting out of it in-house, or going straight to the vendor.

We plan to put both back and front under Apache-2.0. It seems like a good enough way to show that the user won't depend on us.

> Will you be offering migration to and from your SaaS service?

Yes, we plan to continue offering the cloud for those who don't want to deploy their own solution.

> As for building a community, definitely make a Discord and a forum where people can come together and get help publicly, figure out how to get a stackoverflow space for it as well.

We're thinking about Discord right now, even started one. That is an interesting idea about Stackoverflow, thank you we'll think about it!

Are you okay with Amazon taking your code and setting up their own version of SaaS for it? Not saying it'd make financial sense for them, just that… once you open source it they can do what they want.

Also remember that open sourcing something isn't a marketing panacea; you can still struggle to get people interested in it afterwards. It's a useful step if it calms your customers since they don't have to worry as much if you go away, and your value isn't the actual software but support around it or something along those lines.

Yes, I understand the risk, but I really care about trying something new and risky and getting more users rather than running a slow-growing business. If Amazon steals it from me tomorrow, I think I will celebrate for a week :-)

I'll add to the MarkinK's reply: the idea is that CRM/ERP target audience:

* Requires a considerable amount of integrations, customizations, and other "stuff on top";

* Has huge fears about vendor lock-ins and the possibility of unforeseen migrations/support costs.

So yes, the idea is that allowing not only custom deployments, but competitor SaaS businesses built on top of it can raise the market for the added services. Whether that would really work this way or not is a question we'd be dying to know the answer for :D

Would it make sense to have a license that gives any contributors a full license as long as they have ownership in the company they want to use it with or if that company makes a million in revenue?

my counter: how would you know if someone is using your AGPL software without paying you and how would you enforce it?

Require an api key that calls the mothership regularly

Which is the first thing the user removes from the code.

Not sure what "users" are you talking about. Most users are not programmers and most programmers are not experienced or skillful enough to alter binaries like that.

isn't most YC open-core products AGPL basically not really open source unless you pay them for it?

AGPL is open source, the issue is, think of the GPL, and how you have to share code if you release a binary. The AGPL goes a step further, so if you try to run a SaaS with your own custom code on top of the existing codebase, it says you MUST share your code. Hence, you would want to pay for the right to keep your own modifications.

isn't that basically a non-compete? we can take other peoples code to build an AGPL project but you can't take our code to become a competitor (this would fail the FOSS definition)

How is it a non-compete? You can take our code, just that if you make any changes, you must share them back to the original codebase.