This has always been a fear of open source development… but in reality it’s over exaggerated, thousands of FOSS ideas are posted every day…

My advice would be to treat posting your project like a launch, and get all the readme’s, docs etc ready before posting, so it has the best chance of growing an audience, which seems to be your goal.

But if you really don’t want other people to recycle your idea, then open source is not for you…

2) If it's at risk of being stolen/copied today, it will be the same thing 10-100-1000 days from now. There is no hiding from AI copy cats. Just put it out there and find out if someone actually will want to do it. If yes, you saved yourself a bunch of time.

It happened a million times over, you have some brilliant idea, people start using it, and after a few months some big company puts 10-100 engineers on it and they do the same thing.

I would say that the key is to get to a big enough audience so they would rather buy you out than compete. Easier said than done :P

And the biggest question is: do you want to commit 100% of your time and money to building your company, or you would rather spend your time building new things?

If it's the other case, where you're worried about plagiarism, I actually don't think you need to be too concerned. I once saw an interview with Airbnb's founder Brian Chesky where he talked about how Airbnb also faced many imitators in its early days. These competitors grew rapidly too, but looking back, the difference between imitators and originals is that while imitators might get off to a quick start, they find it hard to persevere through difficulties like the original does in the mid-to-late stages. In the end, it's often the original who stuck with their vision that survives.

Seriously, I think you should just do it closed source and pursue adoption by other channels. If people ask you why it's not open source, say you're not ready to manage it yet.

Selling things online was an idea by Amazon, now everyone sells online.

If you really want people not to copy your idea then make something which cannot be easily vibe-coded or copied easily i.e. which require serious skills.

(posted on HN a couple of weeks back)

If your primary motivation to use an Open Source license is gaining trust and users, you're just going to be disappointed.