Hi Everyone
I hope this post won't upset anyone.
I have been going around in circles with free software licences for a
few years now.
I have posted to FSF on IRC and pretty much received a message of GPL is
the way to go for nearly everyone including me.
Unfortunately it is not right for me and I am almost certain all FSF
approved licences will not meet my needs. I am seriously considering
shipping completely closed source software as I am losing hope of
finding a source included one that will work right for me.
There are two software projects I am working on. One is software to help
parents and therapists working with autistic and speech delayed children
to organize data.
It's still in the planning stage but once complete, I do not want it to
be sold but to be free as in beer forever. If I understand things
correctly to be a FSF approved licence, the licence must allow for
resale, I won't allow this. Parents of autistic kids are already under
enormous stress and most won't end up knowing there was a free as in
beer alternative. parisites will swoop in an screw over the parents by
sellign them the software.
I am attracted to the Reciprocal Public License before the 1.5
modification but no one is using it and that worries me. It is also not
right for the next project...
I also have a project for controlling scientific instrumentation and
crunching data. It's a for profit venture.
I need a revenue model. I could give it away and offer paid support or
sell it and also provide paid support.
Here is a rather upsetting thing..... again sorry if I am upsetting
anyone.....
I really appreciate all that RMS has done for me and so many other
computer users. He has given so much but I think he has ended up hurt by
the same people he helped.
I am not blaming him but I think if he chose a different licence for his
work, things might have been different. What Torvalds did to him was
specifically allowed by the GPL his desire to have people refer to the
OS as GNU/Linus is based on honour and not law.
I want permanent credit for my work with the scientific instrument
control project. If someone else uses the code i want them to have to
display to the user that I was the one who started the project at a
specific font and for a specific time period. This way if other
companies want to offer paid support, the end users will still know that
I was the one that wrote it and i can provide better support for it. If
RMS did something like this I think he would be much better off now.
Is there any licences that could meet one or more of these objectives?
Thanks for reading-Patrick