Seems like green washing for software.
we’re carving a space for companies to safely share
To be fair, it’s no safer than being GPL etc. in that any license is only as useful as your ability to enforce it in court. For a bad actor, whether they violate a fair source license vs a GPL likely isn’t much of a concern at all.
I doubt they’re as worried about people covertly stealing their licenses code as they are about amazonish tactics where a competitor forks the codebase and takes a significant fraction of the users with them, or even just reuses the existing code to host a service, which means they don’t have to ship their modifications back upstream.
I’m not defending the decision, that’s just my experience with how this is usually justified.
it converts to a true open source license after a predefined period of time
What happens if that time never comes for the company and it goes out of business?
The conversion is part of the license. It does not require the company to take any action.
The source is available with a restricted license, and e.g. two years later it relicenses itself to a FOSS license, automatically, as defined by the original license.
The source code is available, and the conversion is automatic, so it doesn’t matter if they do go out of business
