Ask HN: How to engage community before open-sourcing, and how to license?

I'm working with a VC-independent team that is open-sourcing https://voiden.md in the following months. The goal is to try and foster community while avoiding traps where paid features limit freedom, or even to come off as potentially being just one more of those oss-as-a-strategy bait-and-switch companies.

Now, the feature-limiting bit is IMHO taken care of. However, when it comes to licensing and contributing in general... we are currently debating the strategy and approach, and I have a few dilemmas.

- How to pick a license to balance user freedom with preventing cloud providers from repackaging it? What trade-offs did you face? Or is that not even a concern?

(I understand the theoretical differences between the nature of MIT vs Apache vs GPL, but I'd also argue there are enough people out there able to try and break out of what seemingly is a license constraint, and again, these folks are VC-independent, so avoiding as many uphill battles as possible is preferable)

- Is it even possible to encourage community involvement (e.g., for roadmapping) before being OSS?

(I feel like cloud-based open-core tools face less distrust VS their not-yet-OSS, offline, no-account, no-telemetry counterparts)

Much appreciated!