80
votes
Accepted
Can I license my project with an open-source license but disallow commercial use?
No free/open-source license may disallow commercial use.
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 ...
- 9,298
72
votes
Accepted
Under copyleft, why distinguish between "free as in free speech" and "free as in free beer"?
You've noticed that if a piece of software is "free as in speech," it will probably become "free as in beer" too. That's completely true.
The important thing, however, is that the ...
- 1,155
60
votes
Accepted
Can I relicense an abandoned GPL project if the copyright owners are no longer responsive?
The GPL, and software licensing in general, must be understood in the wider context of copyright.
Only the copyright holder of a software can issue a license.
You have no rights to the software, ...
- 38.6k
42
votes
How can I deal with this (predatory?) scenario?
TL;DR: Open Source is not about fairness, but about Software Freedom. It is irrational to publish Open Source, and to be then surprised that others are exercising their freedoms. Once a company has ...
- 38.6k
26
votes
Accepted
MariaDB: How can the license being held by a foundation forbid Oracle from buying MariaDB?
How can the license being held by the foundation forbid Oracle from buying the Whole Entity ?
Because it's not for sale. This from the foundation's Certificate of Incorporation:
FOURTH: The ...
- 47k
23
votes
Accepted
Gimp and Inkscape on Android: licensing (GPL?)
if the original licences for these products was the GPL (GNU General Public Licence), how is it, that, these are sold for a fee (although the fee is minimal)?
As we have said elsewhere more clearly, ...
- 47k
21
votes
Open-source license to prevent commercial use?
There is now a license specifically designed to create source-available software for non-commercial use, namely the Commons Clause License.
There have been some very strong characters in the history ...
- 361
21
votes
What does it mean by "commercial support available" for an open-source platform?
Commercial support is support offered on a business basis, to meet business needs.
Commercial support is not compulsory, and indeed many (I'd say most) open source projects do not advertise this.
...
- 463
20
votes
Accepted
Can I use a Apache v2 licensed driver for a commercial project without revealing sources of the project?
To my understanding, if I modify the library, I need to give the source of the library with the changes highlighted.
No, you have no such obligation. The Apache 2.0 license does not contain any ...
- 35.6k
18
votes
Accepted
Open-source license to prevent commercial use?
What you are looking for is, I think, the common practice of selling exceptions.
When an organization or a company is the sole copyright owner of a software, or have a permission to do so from all ...
- 5,557
17
votes
Can I license my project with an open-source license but disallow commercial use?
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'...
15
votes
Is it possible to restrict GNU GPLv3 to non-commercial use only?
The natural interpretation of such a license declaration is that they are dual licensing their work:
You can use and distribute it under the terms of the GPL3, which because it is a copyleft license ...
- 7,728
14
votes
GPLv2 - licensing for commercial use
Yes, to people to whom you have distributed the binary.
No, they can also get it from someone else who has a (presumably paid-for) binary, and lawfully use that copy. Because GPLv2 s3 says "You may ...
- 47k
14
votes
Accepted
How do products like MongoDB not violate the GPL licenses?
MongoDB requires contributors to sign a contributor agreement where they have to waive all rights so that MongoDB can license the code subsequently under whatever license they see fit. That includes ...
- 10.7k
14
votes
Accepted
Open-source license (probably not FLOSS) that allows "use in a commercial context" but disallow "to sell the software or modified versions"?
There are no open-source licenses that forbid selling copies of the software, because that kind of restriction is not allowed in a license that is recognized as an open-source license by the community/...
14
votes
Can I relicense an abandoned GPL project if the copyright owners are no longer responsive?
Copyright does not allow for that. You need to wait 70 years after the copyright holders' deaths to do this.
In that respect it is no different from a closed source license: If you want to change the ...
- 241
14
votes
Under copyleft, why distinguish between "free as in free speech" and "free as in free beer"?
This is why most Open Source vendors sell service plans rather than software.
Yes, the nature of Open Source licenses would allow anyone to download and install the software for free, and to in turn ...
- 241
13
votes
Accepted
Red Hat acquires Ansible - why?
First of all, by acquiring Ansible they not only get the copyright for the software, but most importantly the workforce - the developers who developed the tool. That is much more important than the ...
- 11.1k
12
votes
Accepted
Can a free software (as in free speech) be not free (as in free beer)?
What freedoms you provide to a recipient of a piece of software is orthogonal to what price you charge to transfer a copy of that software to someone.
The FSF's position on selling free software is:
...
- 35.6k
12
votes
Under copyleft, why distinguish between "free as in free speech" and "free as in free beer"?
Actually I think this rule is coming from the ages before internet was available for everyone. Like 29 years ago you could buy a few floppy disks with linux on it. And that the vendor could charge you ...
- 221
12
votes
Accepted
Preventing commercial exploitation of small changes that require a lot of work
implement the same patches with some minor changes (e.g. replace a for with a while) under their 2-clause BSD license
While copyright is based on the implementation of an idea, it is broader than the ...
- 18.5k
11
votes
Use of BSD-3 Clause license and python software license for proprietary use
BSD-3 clause is a very permissive license that does not require you disclosing your source code or the source code of the open source libraries. You are not required to allow your users to re-...
- 2,406
11
votes
Can I license my project with an open-source license but disallow commercial use?
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 ...
- 211
11
votes
Will there be any restrictions if I use a MIT licensed module which is built on a GPL library in my commercial software?
There is uncertainty about whether or not dynamic linking makes a derivative work and thus engages the GPL (pro, con). But reading the python module's README, it seems to me that the developers have ...
- 47k
11
votes
How can I deal with this (predatory?) scenario?
Could this scenario be considered unfair?
No. It is simply a bad business plan of company A.
The GPL and other open source (as in freedom, not beer) licenses are exactly what they are. There is no &...
- 358
11
votes
Open source licenses and royalties
How does that license model work in practice/technically?
Generally, pretty well. Given a company that produces a free-software product which they will also host for a charge (ie, SaaS), users have ...
- 47k
10
votes
Accepted
When is a commercial company allowed to acquire an Open Source project?
They are also planning to change the licensing of the project, or make it dual-license.
Unless you have signed a CLA or assigned the copyright of your contributions in some way, they cannot legally ...
- 18.5k
10
votes
Accepted
Is it ethical to release free, zero-cost software if it will destroy the competitive market?
Consider, for a moment, a camp for the "re-education" of political prisoners, otherwise-innocent critics of the current repressive regime. A revolution happens, an enlightened regime comes ...
- 47k
10
votes
Excluding open-source contributions from work-for-hire
Is there language I can insert that carves out an exception for patches I make to the open-source dependencies
Of course, but you've missed out the second requirement: that it be acceptable to the ...
- 47k
9
votes
Accepted
Can I sell closed source software which uses some CC BY-NC-SA code?
Unless I've completely misunderstood the question, that would be violating two of the Creative Commons license's restrictions:
That it can only be used in non-commercial contexts
That any derivative ...
- 7,728
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