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Arent there OSS license types that disallow commercial forks and/or service businesses? I'm assuming if someone chose a license that allows for commercial activ
by TuringNYC 6y ago
Arent there OSS license types that disallow commercial forks and/or service businesses? I'm assuming if someone chose a license that allows for commercial activity, they want it to happen.
- skrtskrt 6y agoThis is what GPL covers I believe? I want to be sure, but a lot of OSS license explainer sites I see aren’t super clear.
- timyim 6y agoYes there are. MariaDB has built a license that prevents strip-mining of open source code and prevents Cloud providers from offering it as-a-service. CockRoachDB followed suit and implemented the same.
- josephcsible 6y agoThose aren't open source.
- mikepurvis 6y agoRight, and that may have consequences for whether a particular distro packages you or whether the OSI shines on you, but those are just part of the trade-off; a license like this is still a perfectly valid choice for a given endeavour.
- rectang 6y agoNo, there are not. Disallowing commercial use is a field-of-use restriction and thus violates the Open Source Definition. https://opensource.org/osd#fields-of-endeavor https://opensource.org/osd#fields-of-endeavor > 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research. The GPL and AGPL require reciprocity but do not disallow commercial forks. Other licenses out there may disallow commerical forks, but they are not Open Source licenses.
- monoideism 6y agoAGPL was created for exactly this reason. It covers all SaaS, and requires all such services to open source all their software that directly touches any AGPL code (eg, as a library).