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I'm planning to start an MIT licensed project for a Web Server like Apache and Nginx, but primarily targeting the Windows Platform. Those that don't understand open source software are calling me crazy to do such a thing.
A question that comes up is:
What prevents a large company with deep pockets from rebranding my MIT licensed project and killing me off?
Even if by that time, I have an established brand, the large company can 'out market' and 'out brand' me as they have more money to spend.
There is not much which would disallow that. The MIT license is pretty liberal and as long as one obeys the requirement to display the copyright notice in the product appropriately, there's not much one could do against that other than offering the better product and/or service.
See also the excellent answer by congusbongus in this similar question as well as the answer by Eric. Marketing/Advertising is not everything, especially in the vicinity of open source.
Firstly, this is against the spirit of open source; if you don't want people exploiting your work without paying you, don't use open source licenses in the first place.
rebranding
However, you do have one option: you can protect the branding itself by registering the name as a trademark.
"Red Hat" is a trademark. Other people can't call their releases "Red Hat".
The open source components of Red Hat Linux (almost all of which are from third parties anyway) have been released as "Fedora" and "Centos".
MIT licensed project for a Web Server like Apache and Nginx, but primarily targeting the Windows Platform
While there might be some people who want to use it, the commercial market for it is likely to be absolutely tiny and the main deterrent to other companies will be the lack of customers.
(I worked on one of the last third party closed source cross-platform webservers, Zeus, in the early 2000s, and even then it was obvious that Apache were going to dominate except where performance was absolutely critical. The main question you'll face is why to use your webserver rather than IIS - or as is popular these days, a standalone app running node.js or Razor Pages etc)
Reading "Business Model Generation" by Alexander Osterwalder helped me understand a) how businesses actually work, b) how selling software actually works, and c) how open-source companies (among others) do it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7723797-business-model-generation
In a nutshell, any company is going to need developers, maintainers, and marketing. In an open-source company, the development and maintenance is partially pushed onto others, and a significant part of the core business becomes about building loyalty, trust, and a following.
Think hard about what your role would be in a successful open-source company - there are several options.
development and maintenance is largely pushed onto others. If you don't have great in-house expertise and very active project contributions, you are in a very weak position to offer it. There are a lot of small companies trying to ride that way but it is limited to less diligent customers. Maybe a way to start though.
Dec 2, 2020 at 9:58
I wrote a book on FreeBSD 20 years ago. And today I make money from Windows Desktop, Windows Server, Ubuntu and FreeBSD.
You have to keep in mind that Windows Server costs money so nobody is going to buy it just to bang around on and have fun with. They buy it because they have an app that lists it as a requirement.
You take for example Clearview software, they have products that require Windows Server + IIS + SQL Server. (SQL Express works fine) However, IIS, as you know is a very poor web server for a lot of reasons.
But, Microsoft supports it like the dickens. If a developer at Clearview runs into a problem they pick up the phone and call Microsoft and Microsoft goes out of their way to fix the problem maybe even doing significant programming work for the Clearview developer. That is why Clearview doesn't support Oracle or Apache on Windows or any of that; just Microsoft products.
Even though you hand out the code for a free Windows web server, since IIS ships at no cost with Windows Server already, it is zero-cost vs zero-cost and the decision will then be made on who provides more support. And that's Microsoft.
There is a huge need for OSS on Windows. But not for products that go head to head against Microsoft products that are zero-cost.
Using a liberal license as MIT usually means you assume one of the two things:
If you want strong guarantees that you will be able to keep up by using their additions in your product as well, you need to use a strong copyleft license like the GPL.
