[II2II]

I'm not sure how that will solve the problem. Chance are the software would still be used in business environments and you would still have people asking for support on behalf of their employer. I have heard stories a plenty of businesses doing that in the 80's, when support was typically offered for free, with pirated software. The only thing that reduced that type of shenanigans were paid support contracts. Your only real recourse is suing for license violations, and relatively few open source developers are going to have the means to do that against a medium business, never mind a major corporation.

[Pannoniae]

I just find it absurd how you are literally not allowed to restrict who uses your software and for what purpose.

[Plasmoid]

What are you talking about? You can restrict your software from being used for anything at all.

iTunes is famously prohibited from being in the making of nuclear weapons.

[Pannoniae]

Sorry, I was a bit unclear. I was talking about the fact that if you release your code as open source but want to restrict how it is used, people will brigade you and flame you for not providing the users all the OSI freedoms.

OSI doesn't have a trademark on the expression "open source"....

[Plasmoid]

Words mean things. If you say open source, people are going to expect that your license is going to follow the existing expectations set by OSI.

Think about this as setting expectations. You can avoid all the controversy by saying that your software has a generous 'source-available' license. People will know they don't get all the freedoms, and that might be ok, but people won't get upset that you misled them.

[Pannoniae]

Fair enough, you are entirely right. But wouldn't that draw a different complaint about "why isn't this open source then if you published the code anyway"? I don't have an example right now but I've seen several projects where it's been a huge source of controversy that they've made it source-available but didn't use any FOSS licence for it.

[yawaramin]

So what? There's no trademark on 'email' either. Does that mean anyone can redefine it to whatever they want?

[ydlr]

Once you give it to them, its not your software. It is theirs.

[Pannoniae]

But this is the entire point - I want to publish my source code, but I also don't want to give it away in that way.