I’ve been reading about software licensing as I feel that I’m at a stage now, where I should probably have some sort of a license associated with my code.
What I am looking for is a copyleft (weak or strong) license that basically is very liberal. So I’d like the license to allow anybody to do anything with the code/program with the exception that nobody can ever make money from the code. I don’t want anybody to be able to get my code and sell it, or to get my code and sell it or get my code, modify it in any way and sell it. I don’t want anybody to be able to make money from any code I write. Aside from that, I don’t care how it is used as long as the original author of the code (in this case, me) is associated with the code that I wrote.
I’ve looked at the GPL license, the MIT license and a few others and I can’t find what I want. Does anybody have any suggestions?
If it matters, the license will be associated with C/C++, assembler and Ruby programs.
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Let’s ask the License-o-mator! Hmm, “Allow modifications of your work?“, yes. “Allow commercial uses of your work?“, no. “License Jurisdiction“, probably “International”. Answer: you want the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license (aka “CC BY-NC 3.0”).
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What you are looking for is not really open source or free software that main stream copy left licenses are made to support. It’s seems more like a rather strict proprietary license.
If you still want to stick with copyleft, I’m thinking of something like AGPL which is pretty much GPL but with the additional requirement that changes to the source needs to made available if it’s used in a web based service (typically if you write server based software or similar).
People still can make money out of this. GNU/Linux is sold in enterprise versions by for instance Red Hat, even though the same thing is available for free without support. Is that OK for you?
If you need to make totally sure no one will make any money from it, in any way, please consider to write your own strict license. Probably you need to consult a lawyer to get it 100% right.
Maybe you could start out with something like Ms-RSL and loosen it a bit?
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The GPL is probably the closest to your requirements of the standard licenses. Whilst it does allow someone to sell copies of your work, the commercial basis of such a business is rather limited as their customers can get the same code for free on the internet. It also severly restricts the ability of someone to use your code in a commercial product – and even if they did, it would be part of a much larger product, and your work would be a minor part of the commercial deal.
If this is unacceptable to you, then you would need to create your own license.
I do wonder what you are trying to achieve though?
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