[pinephoneguy]

IME the GPL is extremely effective against commercial abuse of FOSS. I don't know what advantage this license would have since you'd need to prevent the people you're granting the license to from changing it in derivative works (otherwise they could just re license it as MIT again.)

[tedivm]

You're getting downvoted but this really is a great point. People tend to avoid GPL in commercial settings. What blocks other people from using GPL on the commercial side is the "share alike" aspects of it, but it's still open source because commercial use is still allowed.

[jaster]

> you'd need to prevent the people you're granting the license to from changing it in derivative works

No you don't need to. People cannot change the license of code they don't own nilly-willy, only the owner(s) of code can (which can get hairy when a codebase has multiple owners).

However a license can allow sublicensing, aka sharing the code or software under a different license, but this right must be explicitly granted by the license (or by the code owner directly), and they may be conditions attached (such as attribution)

MIT:

"[...] Permission is hereby granted,[...] to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, [...] subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

GPL:

"[...] You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License."

So the MIT license grants you the right to redistribute the code under GPL (under attribution condition), but GPL does not grant you the right to redistribute the code under MIT.

(Note that all of this applies to redistributing the code or the software, not about your own internal use of the code or the software)

[q-big]

> IME the GPL is extremely effective against commercial abuse of FOSS.

There do exist people who consider the usage of open source software for cloud services without providing the derived source code also to be commercial abuse. To prevent this usage scenario is what the AGPL license was made for.

[PragmaticPulp]

The GPL doesn’t prevent anyone from using software for commercial purposes.

The OP is trying to prohibit commercial use, which isn’t a feature nor even a goal of the GPL.

[mindcrime]

The GPL doesn't explicitly forbid commercial use, but as /u/tedivm points out, it often has the effect of at least strongly discouraging commercial use. That may actually be enough for what the parent poster wants. Or not... but it's worth talking about.

[smw]

I don't think that's remotely true anymore, especially in a SaaS world. Some fairly big companies use a lot of Linux, for instance...

[marginalia_nu]

Yeah, AGPL is the thing you want now to dissuade commercial use in SaaS.

[webmaven]

> Yeah, AGPL is the thing you want now to dissuade commercial use in SaaS.

The thing is, AGPL allows commercial use just fine, it only disallows proprietary use.

The fact that companies are dissuaded from making commercial use by being prevented from putting a proprietary moat around the software is really an indictment of those companies.

Heck, you can even make AGPL software a bit more friendly for commercial enhancements if you want by granting an exception for plugins the way some GPL software does, but those same companies would probably still be dissuaded.

[mindcrime]

Linux was sort of always the one big exception to that though. But you have a fair point that the SaaS world has changed the dynamic somewhat. That said, I don't think it's changed it that much.

[freeloaderz]

> otherwise they could just re license it as MIT again

Doesn't the first clause of the MIT license prevent this?

[jaster]

The GPL prevents it actually (I made a sibling comment with some details)