License that is MIT-like but prevents wholesale republishing or sale of the original [closed]

Question

I'm releasing a bunch of code that is part of free teaching resources and lessons I'm providing.

For the most part, I'm totally fine with others reusing the code however they want. That's the point.

The one thing I want to avoid though is somebody either taking one of the sample projects and just wholesale republishing or selling it (or making super-minor trivial changes) or trying to take the whole package and republishing or selling it.

Does anyone know of any open source licenses that would fit the bill?

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Edit: To be clear, my main goal is that someone doesn't take this and restrict others access to it by suddenly putting a price tag on it in their "own" "course". I'm not so much worried about them taking the code and doing something like publishing an app on the app store.

Answer 1

Forbidding someone from redistributing or selling the work is considered a restriction that prevents a license from being an open source license. This means that there cannot be any open source licenses that meet your requirements.

What you could do is to use the Apache 2.0 license and use the attribution mechanism of that license to ensure people get at least a link to your original resources. That might be a slightly bigger deterrent for re-publishing than just having to preserve your copyrights.

You could give an additional waiver that the attribution may be dropped if a single sample project is used as a template to create a new project.

Answer 2

It sounds like you should go for GPL, check them out. They allow any use, must distribute full source. If somebody makes a million bucks, good for them! But they must give full source to anybody who gets the program, no futher strings attached (except for those of GPL).

Please read and think over David Wheeler's essay "Make your Open Source software GPL-compatible. Or else.". Go check the various "what license should I use" sites, like choosealicense, see and compare licenses at the Open Source Initiative. True, it is work, but it isn't a decision to be taken lightly either.

In any case, make sure you are the owner of the code (any pieces from third parties? other collaborators? you wrote this as part of your job/studies (then it probably belongs to your employer/school)?). If not, you'll have to get any (substantial) contributor/co-owner get to approve the license formally.