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Question: Best licence for open source but stop commercial usage?
Hi.<p>We believe strongly that our mobile physical securitu tool for human rights defenders, journalists and NGOs should be free and open source. (Sign up at www.secfirst.org - sorry for the blatant plug :). However we want to avoid organisations from making a commercial profit from or publishing their versions of software under our name. Basically to reduce people who might want to stick a back door into the software and then upload it elsewhere and/or build the source into their own for profit software. Of course, if they were using some of the source for nonprofit software then thats great :)<p>Any thoughts would be appreciated.
- k__ 13y agoI always stick to GPL-like stuff for any software and release the same software with paid-licences for commercial customers.
- Yaa101 13y agoNot sure how to weigh your application, if it is a normal program then GPL3 will probably be a good choice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL If you want to protect the users of service then probably GPL3/Affero will do the job: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License If these won't do it then either search on or wait for better answers. Success! Edit: These licenses like most open source licenses will not prohibit people from forking your software nor will they prohibit commercial interaction, they simply protect the rights of your users. What you probably want is trademarking your brand.
- ig1 13y agofwiw the generally accepted definition of open source (the OSI one http://opensource.org/osd http://opensource.org/osd) prohibits discrimination between users. Hence none of the OSI compatible licence (i.e most major open source licences) will give you what you want.
- tptacek 13y agoNot directly. But the GPL variants impose restrictions that are often incompatible with business use.
- belorn 13y agoOnly businesses that want to take other peoples code, modify and distribute it, and the go and sue any user who themselves want to further modify or share the software. That type of business use is incompatible with GPL. Thankfully, it is not the common case, as often businesses just want to use the software privately. That is always compatible with the GPL.
- cbhl 13y agoIANAL, but preventing commercial usage might prevent a lot of journalists from adopting the use of your product.
- secfirstmd 13y agoThanks for the responses everyone!
- tptacek 13y agoAGPL is the standard answer to this question, isn't it?