[cc-licenses] open source non commercial license
Mark Brown
broonie at gmail.com
Mon Feb 5 15:15:21 EST 2007
On 2/5/07, Emerson Clarke <emerson.clarke at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I wish there was a way i could just say it was free for open source
> use but not free for commercial use. But the more restrictive
> licenses get in the way of that becuase they are incompatible. It
> would then mean that my code could never be used with a GPL project.
The usual approach in that situation is to do as Rob suggested and dual
license the software under both the GPL and a proprietary license. QT is one
prominent example of this approach.
This allows at least GPL compatible free software applications to use the
work but does limit what can be done commercially, especially where the work
is a library like yours. Anyone who wanted to develop a proprietary
application using the library would have to obtain a commercial license
before distributing their application. It doesn't completely eliminate
commercial exploitation (people can still do things like sell Linux
distributions including the software) but anything that did would have
trouble getting accepted by the community.
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