PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 license is proprietary software?

Question

I saw an interesting project for self-hosting.

Umbrel is licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 license. TL;DR — You're free to use, fork, modify, and redestribute Umbrel for personal and nonprofit use under the same license. If you're interested in using Umbrel for commercial purposes, such as selling plug-and-play home servers with Umbrel, etc — please reach out to us at partner@umbrel.com.

But this seems proprietary/commercial software? OpenWashing? It seems not approved by opensource.org and Debian guidelines.

Answer 1

The PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 license is not a free license as defined by this site. It is a source-available license, and you have a license for distributing the code (e.g. useful for JS of a website). But it is unclear under which terms you can distribute derivative works, because there are no sub-licensing rights.

I would stay away from any code under this license, unless I am certain to only use the code for personal, non-commercial purposes. Please note that even a personal website with so-called 'Affiliate-Links' might be too much and put you outside of the scope of the 'permitted purpose'.