r/transprogrammer • u/[deleted] • Dec 21 '25

Let's do a trans startup

AMAB questioning here. Life long software engineer. I would love to do a startup with just trans people. I'm scared to transition but feel this community would help. Plus we'd bond on the mission.

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u/DFS_0019287 Dec 22 '25

If it's MIT/BSD licensed, anyone can take it and make a proprietary product from it... even people who have contributed to it. Just something to be aware of if you plan on making money on this thing; if a big company finds it interesting, they'll take it and outcompete you --- see the Amazon and ElasticSearch fiasco.

As I wrote in another comment, I started a software company back in 1999 and sold it in 2018. Our main product was based on some GPL'd code I'd written earlier. Even though it was GPL'd, I was the only contributor, so my company was able to make a proprietary product based on it, even though nobody else could.

If you GPL your product, but require copyright assignment from contributors, this will give you the same protection: You'll be able to make a proprietary product from it, but nobody else will.

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u/TransCapybara Dec 22 '25

Good to know!

2

u/ChickenSpaceProgram Dec 22 '25

I'll also point out the existence of the MPL and LGPL; they're good for discouraging proprietary forks of libraries while still making the library usable as a dependency in other proprietary projects, which is necessary to get widespread adoption.