I work for a metal fabrication shop. We're making a tool to do a thing because we can't find any like it on the internet yet.

I have talked to the owner about making this tool open source. He's not totally against it but he wants to make sure nobody will be able to "steal it" and take our customer base, and it for sure wants to make a profit by selling it to similar companies.

We have no "infrastructure" to speak of, in terms of servers or cloud stuff, and I'm such a local-only FOSS nerd that I have no idea how to do any of that DRM suckery like checking license keys and making people's programs stop working out of nowhere. This program won't be a main source of revenue and we don't have the time or resources to dedicate to restricting it (at least I assume we don't, unless you all know of an easy way).

Since we have no infrastructure, I think we should make the tool free (I'm biased on that point to the extreme) and make money by offering setup and training, as well as (the main thing really) selling the pre-made materials library, because who wants to add thousands of materials manually when we sell the whole package for $1k or whatever?

I've thought about not going full open source, and instead using something like the Functional Source License.

I assume the folks here on this site have more experience making money with open source than I do. What do yall think?