Journiv is source-available but not “Free Software” under the FSF/OSI definition. I chose the PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 license intentionally to keep the code open for personal and educational use which allow hosting for non-commercial while preventing "commercial" redistribution or hosting for commercial gain without permission.

My motivation behind Journiv is to give a solution to self hosted people like me and other a journal first experience on par with any major cloud offering so that they don't have to mold their usage to a notes app and be unsatisfied and frustrated like me. This license enables everyone in the self hosted community to use Journiv.

I did consider permissive and copyleft licenses (Apache, GPL, BSD, etc.), but sustainability is a major concern for this project. I have already spent hundreds of hours on this over last couple of months and there is so much more to build (take a look at the issues page of github repo). I want to keep development open and transparent while ensuring that commercial entities can’t simply repackage and profit from it.