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I'd like to make my project open-source. Is there a free/open-source license that lets me do that, but disallows anyone receiving my project to use it for commercial purposes or monetary gain?
In a similar vein, what if I find a project that says it's open-source but its license disallows using it for commercial purposes or monetary gain?
This is a canonical question. New questions asking effectively the same thing as either of the above questions may be closed as a duplicate of this one.
The whole purpose of the Free and Open movements is an altruistic one: if you're making your project free and open, you're gifting it to the public at large, under certain terms (which often boil down to "attribute it back to me"). See the Open Source Definition for some explanation of what these movements are trying to achieve, and why no open-source license can disallow commercial use.
One of the central tenets of these movements is that they do not discriminate: your software becomes something that anyone can use, no matter for what purpose they're using it. Point 6 of the Definition sums it up: "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor". You can't say "open-source but non-commercial", because that does exactly that - discriminates against those who wish to use your software for commercial purposes.
Sure, you can, if you really want to. What you can't do is restrict commercial use and still call your project open-source. As the copyright holder, it's your prerogative to restrict any kind of use of your software, if you wish to, or to keep it to yourself and not allow anyone else to use it at all. If that's what you want to do, that's your right - but the Open Source movement is about sharing gratuitously, not about excessive restriction; you can place restrictions on your own software, but you can't truthfully claim that it's still truly open-source.
They're lying to you - though whether that's intentional or not, who knows. Sorry. See above. Refer the maintainers of that project here, if you're not sure whether or not they know the difference.
A number of people use "open source" to mean "source-available", thinking the two are synonymous. For many purposes, they are, but a strict interpretation of the term "open source", as coined by the open-source movement, includes the philosophy of not placing restrictions on the use of the licensed software.
You can dual-license your software. This is a very common model: you offer your software, open-source, under the terms of a copyleft license. Anyone can use this, for any purpose, but since a copyleft license requires that the project developed around your software be distributed under the same (or similar) license, using a copyleft-licensed project for commercial purposes is often more difficult than with a permissive license.
At the same time, you advertise that you also offer your project under a closed-source license that offers the licensee more freedom (and the ability to not have to redistribute their software as open-source too). The catch? You sell these licenses, rather than giving them away. If someone wants to pay you to be able to use your software for commercial purposes, you sell them one of these licenses, and you both win.
If you just want to disallow any commercial activity using your software, no matter whether they're paying or not, you have two options:
Yes you can (but with big caveats)
There are several licences that disallow commercial use of the software (or other intellectual property). Most notably CC BY-NC 3.0 but please keep in mind that it's generally not recommended to use CC BY-NC 3.0 licence for software (you still can!).
There are several problems associated with this kind of licensing though mainly:
Practical solution
If you want to reduce commercial use one of the more effective ways is to choose very strict licence like AGPL 3.0 and dual licence it with a commercial licence.
While it does not strictly forbid the commercial use, it's strict virality and no "over the network" loopholes, make it toxic enough for most corporations to not touch it with a stick.
Even if some corporation does make use of it, they'll be required to share any improvements they make for it for free (with conditions).
What exactly "Open Source" means differs depending on who you ask
So take all answers with a grain of salt, some of the open source organizations recognize licences that restrict commercial use, most don't.
People often mix, misunderstand the meaning of the "free software" and "open source". It doesn't help the fact that often those terms are used incorrectly on purpose (eg. by commercial vendors that want "open source" badge just because they published a source code), or the fact that initially Free Software was synonymous with Open Source, but then meanings slightly diverged.
It also does not help when open source/free software community often cannot agree what is what.
No, but you can get close enough: you can prevent your Open Source project from getting included in a closed-source project (for example, by using a GPL license), and then offer a dual-license option for companies who don't want to release their own proprietary code as open source.
MySql follows this model, and has since before Oracle bought them.
Open Source has a single definition - the open source definition, created by the group that created the term open source - OSI. There is no other other group that purports to define the term open source. However as there's been some confusion about related movements and their organisations, I will discuss these other movements and organisation in this answer.
- 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 Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project does not define open source, but rather a separate concept known as Free Software.
Thus, to exclude commercial use, commercial development or commercial distribution would hobble the free software community and obstruct its path to success. We must conclude that a program licensed with such restrictions does not qualify as free software.
The Open Source Defintion was created from the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The Debian Free Software Guidelines do not attempt to define open source, but rather to define what software can be included in the Debian Linux distribution.
- 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.
