[plug] [OT] After Year 12

[Cameron Patrick]

James Devenish wrote:
> You can just write your own licence.

Sure, but that's not generally a good idea.  There are a lot of
complaints on debian-legal about "license proliferation" and often
licences are deemed to be non-free because they are poorly written and
either don't say what they were intended to say or because they don't
grant quite enough freedom for inclusion in Debian in some stupid way.
Another problem with licences written because someone thought that
playing lawyer would be a fun way to spend an afternoon is that they
may be free but not GPL-compatible: see the article "Make Your Open
Source GPL-Compatible. Or Else"[1] for an explanation of why you may
want your licence to be GPL-compatible.

[1] http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html

A licence that specifically prohibits or restricts commercial use is
not only non-free, but possibly also unlawful (as copyright law can't
restrict usage, AFAIK).  A licence restricting commercial distribution
would also not be a free software licence (in which case you don't
really have to worry about debian-legal :-P); this is why e.g. POV Ray
is only available in the non-free section of Debian.

However, in practice, the GPL does a pretty good job of eliminating
commercial distribution and is probably the kind of licence that you
were looking for.  It says that people are free to sell your software
for as much as they like, but they must provide the source and allow
the recipient to distribute the software however they like.  Thus,
there is relatively little incentive for anyone to pay money to
someone selling your software for profit, as they can get exactly the
same software for free.  This applies to software derived from yours,
too: source code must be provided and others must be allowed to
distribute it for free.  The GPL also has the advantage that pretty
much everyone else uses it too, even though James D doesn't much like
it.

Disclaimer:  I'm not a lawyer but I've seen a play written by one :-)

Cameron.