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by verdverm 130 days ago
If you use a non-standard license, I will pass on your project, legal is not going to take the time to review and will just reject. It can be counterproductive to your project depending on your goals

You are looking for "ethical" / "permissioned" licenses (as many as there are people's gripes or causes), versus permissionless like MIT / Apache-2 / BSD-3

There is no legal way to prevent things. Bad actors will not care about your license. If you catch them, you can pay lawyers to try and have it enforced, but these licenses have not been tested in court yet, so no one knows who will win.
2 comments
internet_points 130 days ago
> depending on your goals

is the important bit. Is your goal to have your project used by companies which have to "run things through legal", or do you have better goals?

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gkbrk 130 days ago
Not just companies, people too. It will have trouble getting into Linux distro repos. And a lot of devs/users avoid non-open-source projects especially if they went looking for solutions on Github.
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verdverm 130 days ago
The distro repos is a good point and the user went looking for permissionless GitHub projects is even better
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embedding-shape 130 days ago
> If you use a non-standard license, I will pass on your project, legal is not going to take the time to review and will just reject. It can be counterproductive to your project depending on your goals

For personal projects, that actually sounds like a good thing, didn't think of it that way. Probably I'll start making my projects MIT-but-modified-enough-to-scare-lawyers, and also provide a "clean" MIT license to companies if they agree to pay per month with either money or engineering hours for maintenance.

Best of two worlds, would get rid of the worst vampires at least.

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