The license is always up to the author. Not open sourcing something doesn't make you evil unless you scarfed up some GPL'd stuff in which case I'd start running. NOW.

Some questions to ask youself:

• Is the software your bread and butter or are the services you provide the thing that really make you the money?
• How easy is it for someone else to start selling services using this software?
• Are there components that you could open source, that wouldn't give away your core business?
• Is there anything else that you could do for the open source movement that is unrelated to this?
• Are your clients going to suffer through not being able to modify the software if you go out of business (probably unlikely unless you're encrypting the scripts somehow) ?
• Are your clients technical enough to get any benefit out of this?

My gut feeling is that as your just starting off, I'd tread very carefully for now. Later on when you're well established and know when your money is going to be coming from, and you're comfortable with opening it up, then do so.

As far as licensing issues go, IANAL and don't know what country you're based in so I'd suggest you do some searches for legal disclaimers. I don't think that open source licenses are any more protective other than that many have had very careful legal scrutiny.

My 2p.

"The future will be better tomorrow." ... from the collected wisdom of George W Bush.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.