I like the idea of the internal use licence (though I don't know if it's novel - just new to me).
> Use of the software for the internal business operations of you and your company is use for a permitted purpose.
But that's all it says about what it means. Is that really enough? IANAL, but surely that leaves plenty of room for someone who is to argue that their use was 'internal'.
I was expecting paragraphs drawing a line between (external) 'users' and internal business operations, can I use it to crunch user data? Only if not done in a client? Only if a 'one-off' analytical operation not built into my product?
Good point. The phrase "internal business" isn't thoroughly fleshed out in the terms. But at the same time, that phrase remains very common in professionally drafted commercial software licenses to this day. It's the flip side of prohibitions on "service bureau" use, which go back decades. Lawyers are used to seeing it.
Simple familiarity explains a lot of why "noncommercial" full stop irks more than "internal business" full stop. But I'm not sure fleshing out "internal business" in the PolyForm Internal Use license would work any practical improvement, either.
Historically, the perceived vagueness of "noncommercial" prevented adoption by a lot of institutions, even academic institutions, who are mostly noncommercial but occasionally do commercial or arguably commercial things. To avoid that holdup, PolyForm's Noncommercial form fleshes "noncommercial" out, not by defining "noncommercial", but by green-lighting a list of specific kinds of institutions. I don't think the Internal Use license has the same institutional-acceptance problem.
I'm affiliated with PolyForm, but don't speak for it here.
I really wanted to hate this going into it, but I think this is stellar. I echo some of the wishes of others, though - being able to truly modularize the license to include your terms in a way that is legally sound and reviewed would be groundbreaking.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by modularizing licenses, but I'd bet I'm probably for it.
All of the 1.0.0 PolyForm licenses are built from a common template. A lot of the language is completely common across forms. Diffs are fairly clean.
At the same time, we're starting to hear that some of the mechanisms for that modularity, like the concept of "permitted purpose", make reading individual licenses harder than could be. If/when we get around to 2.0.0s, I expect we'll probably individualize the terms more.
If you're interested in modularity for building licenses that haven't been implemented yet, I'll plug a project of mine: https://github.com/berneout/normally-open-closed These are essentially templates with blank spots for what you are or are not allowing.
The standardization-customization trade-off applies as usual. The point is to help people who actually need new license terms to focus on the terms that are actually new, rather than the legal rigging. Think "license framework" or "license starter".
By the by, I'm affiliated with PolyForm, but don't speak for the org as a whole here. Diversity of views and opinions is one of our strengths, though it has slowed us down from time to time.
By modularization, I mean being able to configure the sorts of terms you want in your license, perhaps via UI.
Instead of 6 or so fully-fleshed-out licenses for 6 unique purposes, you'd instead have a selection of "terms" or whatever that each add a limitation or a grant to the license.
I'd be able to check something like "limited liability", "free to use", "free to modify" but perhaps leave "used commercially" and "must re-contribute modifications" unchecked.
The generated result would be a license in a similar format to what PolyForm does now (which I really like, by the way) but with the customized terms.
You could then retrofit the existing v1 contracts into the new system as presets.
I would seriously consider the use of the Polyform Small Business License for my project[1] which is currently MIT and has many small business users. We're concerned that some of the big players in the space will come in and fork/rebrand our software for their platforms. I just wish there was a mechanism for dual-licensing built-in, because big corporations who support the project would be welcome to use it.
I think so, it describes it as 'a menu, like Creative Commons' - and on the adopters page 'AppsCode' is described as using 'Non Commercial and Free Trial' (which are two of the licences listed).
But I'm not sure if that means like usual 'dual licensing' (pick your licence) or a conjunction of their terms, so that any pair is more restrictive than its parts.
I saw the AppsCode example too. I guess you can just dual or triple or ... license it. So I guess it is neither union nor intersection of licenses, but variants of licenses.
Combining PolyForm licenses is certainly possible for many projects. For example, at least in my mind, Noncommercial and Free Trial kind of want to work together, for a pretty common use case.
Folks involved in drafting certainly thought about multi-licensing. That said, neither I nor PolyForm Project have fully vetted all combinations. The easy "out" is "talk to a lawyer", to make sure you avoid any footguns. But I not so secretly hope the licenses are easy enough to read, without legal help, for diligent folks to work through implications themselves.
Nice. I like the small-businesses license. But I'm missing a license that forbids use of the software for or in conjunction with advertisement and/or user-tracking.
Note: none of these licenses seem to be free software licenses; they all seem to violate some section of the Free Software Definition and/or the Open Source definition.
They are making enough license sales for both of them to be fully self-employed working on EPPlus.