6 ms·

I believe I'm in the minority when I say this. Ultimately, if I choose to, I will license my project however I want. If I want to restrict others from selling

I believe I'm in the minority when I say this. Ultimately, if I choose to, I will license my project however I want. If I want to restrict others from selling my product I will do so. Calling it Apache 2.0 + Common Clause makes sense, it's an extremely well known license and it's easier to start there and then say "but with some restrictions". That said, I do see the issue that people may use this software and not understand that the restrictions are there (but they clearly didn't look at the license) so changing the name is a reasonable ask. This article definitely reads as overdramatic, as do the repeated comments on the subject.

vorpalhex 8y ago
These are brownies, but they happen to contain a bit of horse shit. Not a lot, it's just like a tiny sprinkling on top, but they are definitely still brownies! You can't make a substantive change to a license and pretend it's a small deal. You can't hijack core tenants of a license, and then just put a little disclaimer at the bottom. "Buy one get one half off! *The one half off is actually just a plastic model and doesn't do anything" Abusing FOSS licenses to try and control your users software while still using their claim strikes me as pretty bad faith. If you want to use a dual license, that's fine - just do that. "Hey, you can use this for free if you don't make any money, but we want 10% if you're using this in a paid product" -> See? Done, easy, nobody upset. Don't pretend "Hey, this is open source, except it isn't, and please give me your money."
- 99052882514569 8y ago
  >These are brownies, but they happen to contain a bit of horse shit. Not a lot, it's just like a tiny sprinkling on top, but they are definitely still brownies! Don't buy them, don't eat them. >"Hey, you can use this for free if you don't make any money, but we want 10% if you're using this in a paid product" -> See? Done, easy, nobody upset. Don't pretend "Hey, this is open source, except it isn't, and please give me your money." None of that makes any sense. Creative Commons simply restricts selling the software itself. The software is still distributed free, and you can still sell a derivative.
  - amyjess 8y ago
    > Don't buy them, don't eat them. Consumer protection laws say otherwise. We live in a society with rules and punishments for breaking those rules for a reason.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    > Creative Commons simply restricts selling the software itself. CC licenses that are not NC absolutely allow third parties to sell the content. They just don't allow them to hinder others from sharing it for free. As for CC licenses with NC, those do not comply with the Open Source definition either.
  - pritambaral 8y ago
    > Creative Commons ... "Commons Clause" is not a Creative Commons license. The two are unrelated.
- staticassertion 8y ago
  I won't address your analogy since I think it's obviously quite different. Ultimately, people want to keep their code open, develop in the open, bring in contributors, make it easy to adopt and audit their code, etc. They also want to eat and have a home. The extreme hostility I've seen over the years to every OSS project that tries some new way of monetizing is just absurd and damaging to the concept. > "Hey, you can use this for free if you don't make any money, but we want 10% if you're using this in a paid product" -> See? Done, Confusing since what you've just described sounds very much like what is being railed against? You're just talking about taking an open source license and adding a restriction around monetizing the code - this is not open source, as it violates one of the 10 or so requirements to be Truly Open Source (by some organization's standards).
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    >every OSS project that tries some new way of monetizing These are not OSS projects. >You're just talking about taking an open source license and adding a restriction around monetizing the code - this is not open source, as it violates one of the 10 or so requirements to be Truly Open Source (by some organization's standards). 4 requirements, upheld by two highly respected organizations. You can read them here: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html People need to eat, and that's fine, they can license their software in any way that they think will put food on their table. But if it's not open source, don't call it open source.
    - staticassertion 8y ago
      I'm aware of the OSD. I'm referring to open source in the sense of the source code being made available.
      - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
        The term most people use for this is "source available". Calling it "open source" is misleading, and continuing to call it that after it's been pointed out to you is flatly dishonest.
- IggleSniggle 8y ago
  To be fair, “brownies with a sprinkling of horseshit” is extremely descriptive yet concise. I understand what this is faster than reading the recipe for what this thing is.
  - nqzero 8y ago
    the only thing wrong with this analogy is that it's more of a giant spoonful than a sprinkling
  - kazagistar 8y ago
    Calling it "natural addative" would be more similar to how the Commons Clause is named.
  - gus_massa 8y ago
    Using another analogy, it's like "vegan lasagna with meat". We all understand what it mean, but once you put some juicy meat there you can't call it vegan anymore.
    - lodi 8y ago
      I like that analogy even better. Adding some shit to a brownie ruins the brownie but doesn't take away it's "brownie-ness" in a sense. On the contrary, adding any amount of meat to a vegan lasagna instantly disqualifies it from being "vegan". There's an element of binary, black-and-white purity that "being vegan" and "being FOSS" have to have.
    - ldiracdelta 8y ago
      Non-metaphorically, I highly recommend ordering vegetarian pizza with extra meat. You get a bunch of excellent vegetables and meat to boot! Very delicious.
- api 8y ago
  The Commons Clause might be clunky, but its an attempt to address the changes that have happened in the world since the late 1990s. For those who don't know, the FOSS revolution came about in the late 1990s and as a popular movement was largely fueled by concern over the extent to which Microsoft was dominating the PC and (then) PC-based server industries. MS was moving to embrace-extend-extinguish the web at the time too. The Free part of FOSS was critical to competing with Microsoft in the late 1990s, since MS's Achilles heel in the market was its costly and cumbersome licensing schemes. Times have changed quite a bit since then. Today's behemoths are not based in software but in services with network effects. The bad behavior of those behemoths revolves more around exploitation of network effects to lock people into services (not software), and of course the mass surveillance and manipulation of public discourse that becomes possible when everyone is working in a closed silo. FOSS is utterly worthless as a strategy to resist network effect oligopolies and surveillance capitalism. In fact it might be worse than worthless, since many of these surveillance honeypots run on open source software. If you write and release FOSS today you're likely giving free labor to people who will use your tools to spy on you and manipulate you. The difficulty we face now is finding a viable alternative to surveillance capitalism as a way to fund software. The Commons Clause is an experiment in that direction. It may not work, but experiments are welcome.
  - boomboomsubban 8y ago
    This version of events is so incredibly wrong. Free software started in the eighties over concerns about how proprietary software was being used. Embrace-extend-exstinquish was Microsoft's attack on a growing free software market, it had nothing to do with the web. The "free" in "free software" never referred to the price, and is not business strategy. It's used like in "free speech," and it refers to the free modification and redistribution of the code. Free software has a huge presence across computing. Honeypots use free software because everyone uses free software, free software enables bad actors like building roads enables drunk drivers. Looking at your profile, either this is an elaborate troll or I am genuinely amazed in how long you've managed to misunderstand "free software." You use the GPL for your business.
    - 8y ago
- yebyen 8y ago
  > Hey, you can use this for free if you don't make any money, but we want 10% if you're using this in a paid product Is that an actual license? Because that's not what I've seen most often recently, at all. An honest FOSS license + dual licensed for commercial would say "it's fine if you make money, and we don't need a cut... unless you've integrated our software AND you don't want your final product to be similarly open-source." The recent example that's coming to mind is the new CKEditor real-time collaborative version that came out recently. You can integrate this in a commercial product, as long as the users of the product are free to stand up their own instance (instead of paying you to host it, using their editor product as an integrated part of your commercial product.) If your product is closed and you want it to integrate their CKeditor, the other license that is available costs $25/mo per 25 Monthly Active Users. Even if your product is open-source and users are free to go off and host their own instance, it seems likely that many will opt to pay you to host it instead. Doing this supports your development effort and keeps you in business, meanwhile entitling your paid users to whatever degree of support you're offering subject to availability. If it's not worth $X/mo per user to you, to keep the users locked-in to the product that you borrowed part of, and such that the users don't have this other option in case your company goes belly-up, then maybe you should really be open-source? Or maybe you should just build your own whatever-it-is that you wanted for free, to make a part of your product.
  - calgoo 8y ago
    Reminds me a bit of the QT licenses which are dual: "Qt for Application Development is dual-licensed under commercial and open source licenses. The commercial Qt license gives you the full rights to create and distribute software on your own terms without any open source license obligations. With the commercial license you also have access to the official Qt Support and close strategic relationship with The Qt Company to make sure your development goals are met. Qt for Application Development is also available under GPL and LGPLv3 open source licenses. Qt tools and some libraries are only available under GPL. See the comparison chart for details. The Qt open source licensing is ideal for use cases such as open source projects with open source distribution, student/academic purposes, hobby projects, internal research projects without external distribution, or other projects where all (L)GPL obligations can be met." https://www1.qt.io/licensing/ https://www1.qt.io/licensing/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- cowmoo728 8y ago
  Tenants are people who occupy land or property owned by someone else. Tenets are principles or beliefs, with the connotation that they're strongly held principles. I agree with your point, I think there should be a new visible-source (semi-free?) license that includes commercial fees to make it easier for people to evaluate these things without stepping onto a mine.
dedsm 8y ago
I think the main issue is that you state something that's not true, https://github.com/antirez/redis-doc/pull/984 https://github.com/antirez/redis-doc/pull/984 shows that, Redis Labs is claiming license is OSI-approved, when it's not.
- KajMagnus 8y ago
  And maybe also that Redis Search etc were AGPL licensed, but then re-licensed under Apache + Commons Clause, that is, became no-longer-open-source. ... and apparently this mattered a lot to some people / organizations — they forked those Redis modules: https://goodformcode.com https://goodformcode.com
vertline3 8y ago
The language hijacking of the word 'commons' is unethical (a point mentioned in the essay). Congress does it all the time with the names of their bills though.
vvillena 8y ago
The article states two different issues at play. I agree with you on the first one: everyone can license their project however they want. It is your code after all. The second issue is a bit more complicated, and I can't agree with you on this. If adding the Commons Clause to a license changes the license, using the parent's license name to take advantage of brand recognition is misleading for the end users. It is false advertising, and it hurts the brand of the parent license. If "Apache 2.0 + Commons Clause" is so common and so appreciated, surely it wouldn't be problematic to rename the whole thing and avoid this issue.
SquishyPanda23 8y ago
> Ultimately, if I choose to, I will license my project however I want. If I want to restrict others from selling my product I will do so. I don't think you're in the minority here. > Calling it Apache 2.0 + Common Clause makes sense, it's an extremely well known license and it's easier to start there and then say "but with some restrictions". You may be in the minority here. Marketing what you're selling under the name of something else with the deliberate goal of tricking and confusing your users is scummy. You are free to make a bicycle sharing app, and you are free to refer to it colloquially as "Uber for bikes", but when you start putting your app in the app store under "Uber+ Bikes" then you're heading into scam territory.
pron 8y ago
> it's an extremely well known license Extremely well known? It was created only 6 months ago, and practically no one had heard of until a couple months ago when Redis Labs adopted it, to much controversy. > If I want to restrict others from selling my product I will do so. Of course, and the article says so. The question is whether it OK for you to use a non open-source license (by most common interpretations), and yet call yourself open-source source, enjoying the PR benefits.
sytse 8y ago
You can license your project however you want. People are upset because the contributed to these modules assuming they would stay open source, accepted a CLA, and how they are relicensed as closed source. By the way, this is the situation that a DCO addresses https://about.gitlab.com/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-dco-license/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-dco-l... Apache 2.0 with restrictions would have already been much clearer than + Common Clause since it prevents confusion with Creative Commons and Apache Commons. It would have been better still to just call it the Redis license since the restrictions fundamentally alter the license. Many projects using Apache 2.0 software like Debian can't accept the new license.
swat535 8y ago
I think it's actually very simple. You basically want to freeload of the work of people, contributing to your project but want to reap the profits should any of them make money. I'm sorry but you can't have your cake and eat it to. Either make it Free for personal use / students / non profits etc and paid for commercial use. or just do us all a favor and keep your project closed source.
hawski 8y ago
Vegan + Protein supplement¹ Kosher + Fat supplement² Good work/life balance + Long Weekend Clause³ ¹ Chicken ² Pork fat ³ Work also on weekends
gammagoblin 8y ago
I went into this thread expecting to find Commons Clause apologists, and you did not disappoint. >Calling it Apache 2.0 + Common Clause makes sense, it's an extremely well known license and it's easier to start there and then say "but with some restrictions" And that is exactly the problem. You are not interested in the Apache 2.0 license, so stop attaching your own terms to it and undermining it like a parasite. Find another license that has the terms you're interested in or write your own. You don't want a FOSS license, and you aren't interested in writing FOSS software. You do not care about the Apache 2.0 license, you just want to slap it on your software as if it was a brand. You are interested in the marketting opportunity that branding your project with such a license brings to you, not the actual terms of the license itself. That is exactly the point of the blog post, and so you should stop using it. You are undermining FOSS. These licenses were written on the good faith assumption that people would not go and add restrictive terms to them that are directly opposed to the principles and ethics of the license. You are doing that, and that means you are undermining the license and the efforts of all FOSS licensing by legitimising this kind of parasitic behaviour. Just fucking stop, and write your own god damn license.

vorpalhex 8y ago

These are brownies, but they happen to contain a bit of horse shit. Not a lot, it's just like a tiny sprinkling on top, but they are definitely still brownies! You can't make a substantive change to a license and pretend it's a small deal. You can't hijack core tenants of a license, and then just put a little disclaimer at the bottom. "Buy one get one half off! *The one half off is actually just a plastic model and doesn't do anything" Abusing FOSS licenses to try and control your users software while still using their claim strikes me as pretty bad faith. If you want to use a dual license, that's fine - just do that. "Hey, you can use this for free if you don't make any money, but we want 10% if you're using this in a paid product" -> See? Done, easy, nobody upset. Don't pretend "Hey, this is open source, except it isn't, and please give me your money."

99052882514569 8y ago
>These are brownies, but they happen to contain a bit of horse shit. Not a lot, it's just like a tiny sprinkling on top, but they are definitely still brownies! Don't buy them, don't eat them. >"Hey, you can use this for free if you don't make any money, but we want 10% if you're using this in a paid product" -> See? Done, easy, nobody upset. Don't pretend "Hey, this is open source, except it isn't, and please give me your money." None of that makes any sense. Creative Commons simply restricts selling the software itself. The software is still distributed free, and you can still sell a derivative.
- amyjess 8y ago
  > Don't buy them, don't eat them. Consumer protection laws say otherwise. We live in a society with rules and punishments for breaking those rules for a reason.
- majewsky 8y ago
  > Creative Commons simply restricts selling the software itself. CC licenses that are not NC absolutely allow third parties to sell the content. They just don't allow them to hinder others from sharing it for free. As for CC licenses with NC, those do not comply with the Open Source definition either.
- pritambaral 8y ago
  > Creative Commons ... "Commons Clause" is not a Creative Commons license. The two are unrelated.
staticassertion 8y ago
I won't address your analogy since I think it's obviously quite different. Ultimately, people want to keep their code open, develop in the open, bring in contributors, make it easy to adopt and audit their code, etc. They also want to eat and have a home. The extreme hostility I've seen over the years to every OSS project that tries some new way of monetizing is just absurd and damaging to the concept. > "Hey, you can use this for free if you don't make any money, but we want 10% if you're using this in a paid product" -> See? Done, Confusing since what you've just described sounds very much like what is being railed against? You're just talking about taking an open source license and adding a restriction around monetizing the code - this is not open source, as it violates one of the 10 or so requirements to be Truly Open Source (by some organization's standards).
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  >every OSS project that tries some new way of monetizing These are not OSS projects. >You're just talking about taking an open source license and adding a restriction around monetizing the code - this is not open source, as it violates one of the 10 or so requirements to be Truly Open Source (by some organization's standards). 4 requirements, upheld by two highly respected organizations. You can read them here: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html People need to eat, and that's fine, they can license their software in any way that they think will put food on their table. But if it's not open source, don't call it open source.
  - staticassertion 8y ago
    I'm aware of the OSD. I'm referring to open source in the sense of the source code being made available.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      The term most people use for this is "source available". Calling it "open source" is misleading, and continuing to call it that after it's been pointed out to you is flatly dishonest.
IggleSniggle 8y ago
To be fair, “brownies with a sprinkling of horseshit” is extremely descriptive yet concise. I understand what this is faster than reading the recipe for what this thing is.
- nqzero 8y ago
  the only thing wrong with this analogy is that it's more of a giant spoonful than a sprinkling
- kazagistar 8y ago
  Calling it "natural addative" would be more similar to how the Commons Clause is named.
- gus_massa 8y ago
  Using another analogy, it's like "vegan lasagna with meat". We all understand what it mean, but once you put some juicy meat there you can't call it vegan anymore.
  - lodi 8y ago
    I like that analogy even better. Adding some shit to a brownie ruins the brownie but doesn't take away it's "brownie-ness" in a sense. On the contrary, adding any amount of meat to a vegan lasagna instantly disqualifies it from being "vegan". There's an element of binary, black-and-white purity that "being vegan" and "being FOSS" have to have.
  - ldiracdelta 8y ago
    Non-metaphorically, I highly recommend ordering vegetarian pizza with extra meat. You get a bunch of excellent vegetables and meat to boot! Very delicious.
api 8y ago
The Commons Clause might be clunky, but its an attempt to address the changes that have happened in the world since the late 1990s. For those who don't know, the FOSS revolution came about in the late 1990s and as a popular movement was largely fueled by concern over the extent to which Microsoft was dominating the PC and (then) PC-based server industries. MS was moving to embrace-extend-extinguish the web at the time too. The Free part of FOSS was critical to competing with Microsoft in the late 1990s, since MS's Achilles heel in the market was its costly and cumbersome licensing schemes. Times have changed quite a bit since then. Today's behemoths are not based in software but in services with network effects. The bad behavior of those behemoths revolves more around exploitation of network effects to lock people into services (not software), and of course the mass surveillance and manipulation of public discourse that becomes possible when everyone is working in a closed silo. FOSS is utterly worthless as a strategy to resist network effect oligopolies and surveillance capitalism. In fact it might be worse than worthless, since many of these surveillance honeypots run on open source software. If you write and release FOSS today you're likely giving free labor to people who will use your tools to spy on you and manipulate you. The difficulty we face now is finding a viable alternative to surveillance capitalism as a way to fund software. The Commons Clause is an experiment in that direction. It may not work, but experiments are welcome.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  This version of events is so incredibly wrong. Free software started in the eighties over concerns about how proprietary software was being used. Embrace-extend-exstinquish was Microsoft's attack on a growing free software market, it had nothing to do with the web. The "free" in "free software" never referred to the price, and is not business strategy. It's used like in "free speech," and it refers to the free modification and redistribution of the code. Free software has a huge presence across computing. Honeypots use free software because everyone uses free software, free software enables bad actors like building roads enables drunk drivers. Looking at your profile, either this is an elaborate troll or I am genuinely amazed in how long you've managed to misunderstand "free software." You use the GPL for your business.
  - 8y ago
yebyen 8y ago
> Hey, you can use this for free if you don't make any money, but we want 10% if you're using this in a paid product Is that an actual license? Because that's not what I've seen most often recently, at all. An honest FOSS license + dual licensed for commercial would say "it's fine if you make money, and we don't need a cut... unless you've integrated our software AND you don't want your final product to be similarly open-source." The recent example that's coming to mind is the new CKEditor real-time collaborative version that came out recently. You can integrate this in a commercial product, as long as the users of the product are free to stand up their own instance (instead of paying you to host it, using their editor product as an integrated part of your commercial product.) If your product is closed and you want it to integrate their CKeditor, the other license that is available costs $25/mo per 25 Monthly Active Users. Even if your product is open-source and users are free to go off and host their own instance, it seems likely that many will opt to pay you to host it instead. Doing this supports your development effort and keeps you in business, meanwhile entitling your paid users to whatever degree of support you're offering subject to availability. If it's not worth $X/mo per user to you, to keep the users locked-in to the product that you borrowed part of, and such that the users don't have this other option in case your company goes belly-up, then maybe you should really be open-source? Or maybe you should just build your own whatever-it-is that you wanted for free, to make a part of your product.
- calgoo 8y ago
  Reminds me a bit of the QT licenses which are dual: "Qt for Application Development is dual-licensed under commercial and open source licenses. The commercial Qt license gives you the full rights to create and distribute software on your own terms without any open source license obligations. With the commercial license you also have access to the official Qt Support and close strategic relationship with The Qt Company to make sure your development goals are met. Qt for Application Development is also available under GPL and LGPLv3 open source licenses. Qt tools and some libraries are only available under GPL. See the comparison chart for details. The Qt open source licensing is ideal for use cases such as open source projects with open source distribution, student/academic purposes, hobby projects, internal research projects without external distribution, or other projects where all (L)GPL obligations can be met." https://www1.qt.io/licensing/ https://www1.qt.io/licensing/
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cowmoo728 8y ago
Tenants are people who occupy land or property owned by someone else. Tenets are principles or beliefs, with the connotation that they're strongly held principles. I agree with your point, I think there should be a new visible-source (semi-free?) license that includes commercial fees to make it easier for people to evaluate these things without stepping onto a mine.

dedsm 8y ago

I think the main issue is that you state something that's not true, https://github.com/antirez/redis-doc/pull/984 https://github.com/antirez/redis-doc/pull/984 shows that, Redis Labs is claiming license is OSI-approved, when it's not.

KajMagnus 8y ago
And maybe also that Redis Search etc were AGPL licensed, but then re-licensed under Apache + Commons Clause, that is, became no-longer-open-source. ... and apparently this mattered a lot to some people / organizations — they forked those Redis modules: https://goodformcode.com https://goodformcode.com

vertline3 8y ago

The language hijacking of the word 'commons' is unethical (a point mentioned in the essay). Congress does it all the time with the names of their bills though.

vvillena 8y ago

The article states two different issues at play. I agree with you on the first one: everyone can license their project however they want. It is your code after all. The second issue is a bit more complicated, and I can't agree with you on this. If adding the Commons Clause to a license changes the license, using the parent's license name to take advantage of brand recognition is misleading for the end users. It is false advertising, and it hurts the brand of the parent license. If "Apache 2.0 + Commons Clause" is so common and so appreciated, surely it wouldn't be problematic to rename the whole thing and avoid this issue.

SquishyPanda23 8y ago

> Ultimately, if I choose to, I will license my project however I want. If I want to restrict others from selling my product I will do so. I don't think you're in the minority here. > Calling it Apache 2.0 + Common Clause makes sense, it's an extremely well known license and it's easier to start there and then say "but with some restrictions". You may be in the minority here. Marketing what you're selling under the name of something else with the deliberate goal of tricking and confusing your users is scummy. You are free to make a bicycle sharing app, and you are free to refer to it colloquially as "Uber for bikes", but when you start putting your app in the app store under "Uber+ Bikes" then you're heading into scam territory.

pron 8y ago

> it's an extremely well known license Extremely well known? It was created only 6 months ago, and practically no one had heard of until a couple months ago when Redis Labs adopted it, to much controversy. > If I want to restrict others from selling my product I will do so. Of course, and the article says so. The question is whether it OK for you to use a non open-source license (by most common interpretations), and yet call yourself open-source source, enjoying the PR benefits.

sytse 8y ago

You can license your project however you want. People are upset because the contributed to these modules assuming they would stay open source, accepted a CLA, and how they are relicensed as closed source. By the way, this is the situation that a DCO addresses https://about.gitlab.com/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-dco-license/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-dco-l... Apache 2.0 with restrictions would have already been much clearer than + Common Clause since it prevents confusion with Creative Commons and Apache Commons. It would have been better still to just call it the Redis license since the restrictions fundamentally alter the license. Many projects using Apache 2.0 software like Debian can't accept the new license.

swat535 8y ago

I think it's actually very simple. You basically want to freeload of the work of people, contributing to your project but want to reap the profits should any of them make money. I'm sorry but you can't have your cake and eat it to. Either make it Free for personal use / students / non profits etc and paid for commercial use. or just do us all a favor and keep your project closed source.

hawski 8y ago

Vegan + Protein supplement¹ Kosher + Fat supplement² Good work/life balance + Long Weekend Clause³ ¹ Chicken ² Pork fat ³ Work also on weekends

gammagoblin 8y ago

I went into this thread expecting to find Commons Clause apologists, and you did not disappoint. >Calling it Apache 2.0 + Common Clause makes sense, it's an extremely well known license and it's easier to start there and then say "but with some restrictions" And that is exactly the problem. You are not interested in the Apache 2.0 license, so stop attaching your own terms to it and undermining it like a parasite. Find another license that has the terms you're interested in or write your own. You don't want a FOSS license, and you aren't interested in writing FOSS software. You do not care about the Apache 2.0 license, you just want to slap it on your software as if it was a brand. You are interested in the marketting opportunity that branding your project with such a license brings to you, not the actual terms of the license itself. That is exactly the point of the blog post, and so you should stop using it. You are undermining FOSS. These licenses were written on the good faith assumption that people would not go and add restrictive terms to them that are directly opposed to the principles and ethics of the license. You are doing that, and that means you are undermining the license and the efforts of all FOSS licensing by legitimising this kind of parasitic behaviour. Just fucking stop, and write your own god damn license.