OT: non-commercial open source license?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 12:52:54PM -0500, G. Matthew Rice wrote:
> Does he mean 'make modifications and not share it' or just start selling it?
> If the former, the GPL is good enough except for situations like hosting
> solutions where you are selling the service more than the 'product'.  The
> upcoming revision to the GPL is going to fix those situations too (don't know
> what the new bugs will be, though :).
> 
> You can also do things like what DJB does. You can modify and redistribute
> but you can't call it <original name>.

I thought djb didn't allow any binary distribution if there were any
modifications.  Source code/patches only.  Hence the entire problem with
djb's software license.  Same for pine and related mail software.

> Also, any copyright owner on anything 'open source' has the right to make
> proprietary mods as well as 'selling' the software with different licenses.

But if they accept patches and such, what license does that fall under?
At least mozilla explicitly states what the license is and what they
intend to do with patches.

> It sounds like the guy has some decisions to make.  If he doesn't want
> commercial exploitation, for example, because he plans on doing it himself,
> it behooves him to get that ball rolling.

Depends on how people feel about their code.  Some thing the work must
be paid for and hence won't want anyone else to make money from it if
they don't.  Others think the work itself was the goal, and that the
more people it helps the better.  If someone makes money from it, that's
fine too.  They often go for the BSD license.  The ones that want to
pretect every users ability to do the same, tend to prefer the GPL.
Personally I am more of a BSD type of person.

Len Sorensen
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