Ask HN: Which OSS licence? I don't want one specific company to touch it?

4 points by whizzkid 7 years ago | 16 comments

I do not want a company to directly or indirectly to use my open source project. This includes everything. Forking, using it as a service from others and etc.

And the rest of the people and entities can use it with MIT licence.

Is there any way to achieve this?

FBT 7 years ago |

You can license your project however you would like to. You absolutely can have a license with text that is similar to the MIT license, except with a clause saying that company X can't use it. However, as other commentators here point out, you could not, in good faith, call that "open source" under the standard, accepted definitions of that term.

So the answer to "is there any way to achieve this?" is twofold. If the question is "can I achieve this and still legitimately use the term 'Open source software'?", the answer is a flat-out "no". If the question is "can I set it up legally in this way, without regards to the terminology", the answer is yes.

A license is a pretty free-form thing. You can write whatever text there you want. You may wish to consult with a lawyer, in order to get some legal assurance that what you wrote makes legal sense and will hold up in court. This is especially true if you want to be very sure that you didn't accidentally leave some loophole in your wording that will allow the company you dislike to use your project against your will.

You are going to have to write the text of this license yourself (or pay a lawyer to do it for you): you're not going to find much of this kind of "almost-OSS" license out there for you to base yours off of, because in general, those who want to license their software as OSS actually do want a fully OSS license. But there are a few examples, although not quite identical in spirit to your "use case" (excluding a particular company) but instead different variations of not-quite open source. For instance, you can take a look at MongoDB's SSPL (https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license), and Redis Lab's RSAL (https://live-redislabs.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/20...).

whizzkid 7 years ago | |

Thanks a lot for going into details. Since then I learned a lot about copyleft, GNU GPLv3, and much more. Maybe mentioning a company name in a licence is not really what I need after all.

WoodenChair 7 years ago |

There is certainly a way to do this, but by definition such a license would not be “open source.” See clause 5 of the open source definition: https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

whizzkid 7 years ago | |

I understand and thanks for your reply.

> "must not discriminate against any person or group of persons"

Do you think "group of persons" is same as mentioning of a company name?

I am just trying to find a proper/correct solution to achieve this problem.

WoodenChair 7 years ago | | |

Yes it is the same.

celdon25 7 years ago |

A good compromise that would keep things equal for everyone would be to use a strong copyleft license (GPL). Normally when I think of specific scenarios involving companies using it (a real issue that has come up for me before), GPL was strongly considered as an option. Not to prevent them from using it, but rather to ensure that they don't use the free software to gain a further advantage without giving their own improvements to that same software back to the community.

cimmanom 7 years ago | |

GPL only requires them to contribute their changes if they distribute a version of the software with those changes. The AGPL defines distribution to include hosting SaaS, but that may not be applicable to whatever the OP has written.

celdon25 7 years ago | | |

True, I have been trying to steer clear of the "centralize everything on our servers" trend in tech lately so I keep forgetting about that one...

lincpa 7 years ago |

Your property, you have the right to do disposal, it is not important to comply with the open source definition.

Spooky23 7 years ago |

What’s your objective for the project?

You can do anything, but a weird license restriction is going to turn off many potential users. I don’t know or care about who you dislike, and my counsel will not sign off on deploying something that cannot be used by some random people.

whizzkid 7 years ago | |

Idea was to prevent licence violation. It is hard to do anything as an individual against companies that violates OSS licences. But since then I learned much more about licensing, and I think I changed my mind. I won't be mentioning any specific entity.

hacknat 7 years ago |

Instead of targeting a specific company why not prohibit the use case you don’t like? Otherwise I have to agree with others that this seems retributive and childish.

whizzkid 7 years ago | |

Really good point about use case specifications. I sure will be researching my options. Thanks!

caymanjim 7 years ago |

This is antithetical to the entire notion of open source. It also sounds like a childish tantrum.

whizzkid 7 years ago | |

Things are not always black and white as you are stating it to be. I just want to know if there is anything like this done before or is it possible/right to do it.

I am also open to listening why i shouldn't go this route, but not the way you are trying to do it.

gtirloni 7 years ago |

Why?