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by dec0dedab0de 2040 days ago
It'd be interesting to see a license that's permissive for non-commercial use and copyleft for commercial use. Or maybe the copyleft kicks in when the commercial derivative work starts earning a certain amount of money. It would be kind of like dual licensing under CC BY-NC and CC BY-SA.

I think it would still count as a free and open source software license, and it would allow small and independent developers to use the software without worrying much about the license, while requiring big companies to release the source of the derivative work.

It would not count as free or open source

It goes against freedom 0, and criteria 5 and 6 of the open source definition

https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/freesoftware.en.html

https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

2 comments

What I'm thinking of would affect freedom 3 more than freedom 0. I guess by "use" I meant "incorporate in another program". But I still think it counts as free and open source because it doesn't actually prohibit commercial redistribution, it just switches to a different license type.

It's GPL plus an additional permission that noncommercial derivative works don't have to share the source code.

Anyway it's probably not actually a good idea.

The BSL strikes a good balance there: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/

As it always resolves to an open source license after a set amount of time + is always free in many other ways.