

Question: Best licence for open source but stop commercial usage? - secfirstmd

Hi.&lt;p&gt;We believe strongly that our mobile physical securitu tool for human rights defenders, journalists and NGOs should be free and open source. (Sign up at www.secfirst.org - sorry for the blatant plug :). However we want to avoid organisations from making a commercial profit from or publishing their versions of software under our name. Basically to reduce people who might want to stick a back door into the software and then upload it elsewhere and&#x2F;or build the source into their own for profit software. Of course, if they were using some of the source for nonprofit software then thats great :)&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts would be appreciated.
======
Yaa101
Not sure how to weigh your application, if it is a normal program then GPL3
will probably be a good choice:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL)

If you want to protect the users of service then probably GPL3/Affero will do
the job:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License)

If these won't do it then either search on or wait for better answers.
Success!

Edit: These licenses like most open source licenses will not prohibit people
from forking your software nor will they prohibit commercial interaction, they
simply protect the rights of your users. What you probably want is
trademarking your brand.

------
ig1
fwiw the generally accepted definition of open source (the OSI one
[http://opensource.org/osd](http://opensource.org/osd)) prohibits
discrimination between users. Hence none of the OSI compatible licence (i.e
most major open source licences) will give you what you want.

~~~
tptacek
Not directly. But the GPL variants impose restrictions that are often
incompatible with business use.

~~~
belorn
Only businesses that want to take other peoples code, modify and distribute
it, and the go and sue any user who themselves want to further modify or share
the software.

That type of business use is incompatible with GPL. Thankfully, it is not the
common case, as often businesses just want to use the software privately. That
is always compatible with the GPL.

------
tptacek
AGPL is the standard answer to this question, isn't it?

------
k__
I always stick to GPL-like stuff for any software and release the same
software with paid-licences for commercial customers.

------
cbhl
IANAL, but preventing commercial usage might prevent a lot of journalists from
adopting the use of your product.

------
secfirstmd
Thanks for the responses everyone!

