Re: draft of a new Open Source Commercial License

[David Chisnall]

Hi,

On 17 Sep 2013, at 22:45, Pirmin Braun <pb@intars.de> wrote:

> we plan to license the upcoming IntarS 7 under this license.
> What do you think about it?

What is your goal with this license?  I don't think that it will work to 
encourage contributors, because I certainly wouldn't send patches to a project 
where I might suddenly find that I'd have to pay if I started using it a lot.  
I'd also have the same reaction to using it: if I build a program using it and 
deploy it, I don't want to suddenly find that I'd have to pay extra if it 
became popular.

Is the goal simply to allow people to port it to other systems?  Again, I'm not 
sure why I'd put the effort into putting this in the FreeBSD ports tree and 
ensuring that it worked (nor why Sebastian would do the same for OpenBSD) if 
we'd end up having to pay if we used it in anything other than a very small 
scale.  

As others have pointed out, it is not OSI or FSF compliant.  This may also mean 
that it would be hard to distribute in binary form.  As it's currently written, 
it's an end-user license agreement, and so we'd have difficulty distributing 
it, because we'd need to have a framework in place that would require the user 
to accept the license before installing it.  We do this with the Oracle / Sun 
JDK and a few other packages already, and it requires manual intervention and 
prevents us from distributing binary builds.

David