- ... [✔] cover open contributors & open economic sustainability.
- ... [✔] allow non-commercial repurposing & same-purpose distribution,
without generally allowing commercial exploitation, without requiring license-virality. ( Alternative: "Dual licensing", such as: "GNU for everything, except for commerce" )
This draft attempts to explain to every reader and be legally precise-enough too.
Talk to us? ☺ Are you into international law?
(Projects using this license can remove sections and select designated options)
FREEDOMS:
- PERSONAL PRIVATE USE: This work was made for you ♡ (If you like, consider donating or investing and we consider passing it on.)
- If you ever change or repurpose our work for personal use, please still just consider to show us your result or process ♡
- VOTING: Please vote about our future actions. (Undefined method such as user-accounts, universal cryptographic key pairs or national ID). All mentioned parties may be granted proportional votes and maybe rewarded for participating (For example through an ERC-20 Token)
- CONTRIBUTORS: (Unlike popular licences,) we acknowledge, that you become an intellectual shareholder of this project (and or cooperative, Token, DAO, publicly traded company), proportionally to your time well-spent. (By quantity. And by quality as far as reasonably definitely measureable).
- DISTRIBUTIORS: Unmodified pupblishing of our official releases is permitted by default.
- Don't sell our work or wrap it in ads or drive-by installs.
- Same purpose: Additions are allowed when optional, free and non-commercial. (You can add a (sub-)feature and show your credits, when a user voluntarily selects that feature.)
- Technically required changes for other OS's and environments are allowed.
- REPURPOSING:
- Tax-exempt non-profit charity organisations: You can modify and repurpose. Just don't remove our links and credits and let clear who made what.
RESTRICTION:
- COMMERCIALLY REPURPOSING any of the code in any way.
- Written permission/contract is required. (All granted Licenses are published at https://github.com/_/_/Licenses-granted.md)
This license must be included with every piece of our work and refers to the original project: https://github.com/_/_ specifically.
( There is no License-virality. This License needs not to refer to your addition or modification )
Ultimately of course general purposes might be / need to be free: Dentralizaton (crypto, dApps), or under a viral license (if no modification needs to be secret.) Yet smart contracts can also easily cover specifics, such as votings / fair payments. Then this license can serve as a placeholder, while such a project is still only volunteers / strangers on Github.
"WHY RESTRICT COMMERCIAL USE?"
- That's just like asking: "Why tax commercial companies?" "Why does society believe in public goods?"
- Open development and public goods need not be underpaid or paid uncertainly. They need not force themselves to exhaust their productivity and still hardly keep up, even when actually having chosen a worthy and self-sustaining cause.
- One can decide per case, what commercial licenses to sell or not. To set certain moral requirements and avoid exploitation but not give general unconditional, permanent, unpredictable licenses (but rather monthly renewal or SaaS)
- Commercial activity is always taxed and essentially defined through its restriction. And defining it (if all work would be a non-commercial, then tax would not need to exist.)
- "Restricting commercial-use" is simply closest to a legally implemented version of: "Restricting greed".
- Non-profit work can increase when not disadvantaged. ( And non-profits should increasingly receive fair / easy subsidy / minus-tax )
- "WILL RESTRICTING COMMERCIAL-USE SLOW DOWN DEVELOPMENT?"
- Commercial work is prepared for tax / paperworks anyways. ( Which can be automatic / easier through decentralization )
- Commercial development varies, for many modern, complex and specific projects. Often or mostly it is hard to imagine, that requiring to ask first, will hinder good causes. ( While asking might help to connect, motivate or inspire each other).
"NO LICENSE-VIRALITY?"
- Virality means 'exponential growth indicator'. Forcing viral development sounds supportive, besides not all open software might needs or deserves the same strategy.
- Implementations of license-virality allow commercial exploitation permanently and without requiring to add anything.
- Some publishers add adware or spyware to open source works.
- Such versions can exceed the distribution of the originals. ( Visibility might not be balanced or fair yet and billions of users might not review every software they chose. Thus authors should care? (Or at least it is not always helpful to give ownership to every commercial entity by default)
- ( Caring for the present reality of a project does not contradict the overally hope / tendency for more efficient and friendly behavior to grow, careless choices eventually. )
- Such versions can exceed the distribution of the originals. ( Visibility might not be balanced or fair yet and billions of users might not review every software they chose. Thus authors should care? (Or at least it is not always helpful to give ownership to every commercial entity by default)
- Some publishers add adware or spyware to open source works.
- Implementations of license-virality allow commercial exploitation permanently and without requiring to add anything.
- ( There is no one-fit-all required. You can consider to release your work under multiple licenses as needed and with exceptions )