Drafting a good license is difficult. There are many licenses that were written by well-intentioned amateurs, but this might introduce important oversights or even fatal flaws in their license mechanisms. Sometimes, they may fail to properly impose some license condition.
Or they are written so unclearly that they might not be granting the rights they intend to grant. Sometimes, these licenses are created by recombining phrases and sections from existing licenses in a cargo-cult fashion, without understanding their connections. Such DIY licenses are often called a crayon license. If you would like to create open source code without jeopardizing commercial interests, it might be better to move away from the license question to the question which parts can be published freely.
Some parts of your software might be actually valuable to you — the functionality that sets you apart from competitors. And some code is unique to your situation — it doesn't matter if it's open source or not because it's useless to anyone else.
However, there may be some modules that are useful but not particularly valuable to you, for example a configuration library or some frontend widget.
Open-sourcing those might be possible without significant problems. You are most likely already making use of many open source tools and libraries. Instead of creating a new project, you could also consider with the maintenance of those since this will ultimately also benefit you , or you could upstream new features that would help you with your work. Although it does mandate that users who interact with the licensed material via network are given the right to receive a copy of the source code, it doesn't mandate publishing the data.
The developers behind the Timescale database are attempting to do something in this direction with their license, see e. I am unable to judge, whether this has any chance of surviving in a legal court, but I think it is an interesting attempt anyway But in practice this is not viable if it is under the Affero License, as by just creating a service connected to the Internet they would need to publish their software. Hence you could borrow it too.
In reality libre technology forks gets traction only if who creates them goes purposely against the wishes of most of its users, by blocking important contributions to its code. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.
Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Choosing the most restrictive open-source license Ask Question. Asked 11 months ago. Active 11 months ago. Viewed 3k times.
Improve this question. Eerik Sven Puudist. These two requirements are totally contradictory: "make it technically impossible for somebody else to offer it as a service" and "allow others to use it in some other way for instance as a self-hosted version or at least have access to the source code " — Jozef Izso. Go to your project repository and follow the steps listed below:. The absence of a license does not constitute a permission for unlimited use of the software. If you want to remove all restrictions, use the Unlicese — it includes a limitation of liability and explicitly states that it does not provide any warranty.
Therefore, it takes away all obstructions from using your creation and protects you from being liable in case the software causes damages. Spending some time to pick a license is just another form of applying best practices and taking care about your daily work. You can find additional information on the subject by browsing the following links:. What is said about patent licensing and litigation? What legal jurisdiction covers the license? Other considerations in license choice include: Are there project specific affinities?
Many companies are concerned about their patent portfolios when creating open source projects. Google took an interesting approach to the problem when they released the WebM project. It is the nature of IP law that the owner of the property can license it as many ways to as many people as they choose.
Topics Licensing. About the author. Stephen R. Walli - I am a technical executive, a founder, a consultant, a writer, an international business person, a systems developer, a software construction geek, and a standards diplomat.
I love to build teams and products that make customers ecstatic. I have worked in the IT industry since as both customer and vendor. I'm a principal program manager in the Microsoft Azure engineering team.
More about me. Recommended reading What is open core? Avoid this common open source scanning error. Test cases and open source license enforcement. Give something from the heart to the public domain. Setting a standard for digital public goods. Scott Wilson on 29 Jan Permalink. Stephan Sokolow on 29 Jan Permalink. Paula Hunter on 29 Jan Permalink. Rick, Creative Commons is not typically applied to software, rather other forms of creative expression such as blog posts, articles, photos, course ware, etc.
Unidentified on 01 Feb Permalink. It is all so confusing to say the least. Stephen R Walli on 13 Feb Permalink. Dave Crossland on 15 Feb Permalink. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter Get the highlights in your inbox every week.
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