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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Isn't a Creative-Commons-style license good for that? You could choose attribution-sharealike-noncommercial or something like that and be done with it.

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I'm unfortunately even more conflicted than that. I can't answer the question "If someone wants to take my crummy code and commercialize it, am I okay with that?"

If it's a kid in his basement with an amazing idea, absolutely. I'll watch them ring the closing bell at the NASDAQ from my couch and feel nothing but pride.

If it's Google or Amazon... maybe still yes, but less so? It'd depend on my subjective perception of the net benefits to societal innovation, which is 1) more wishy-washy-subjective than I'm comfortable with, and 2) seems like it would make for a really bad license: "MIT-Unless-I-Dont-Like-You"

You should probably just retain those rights then and encourage people to contact you for permission to use it commercially under a more specific license. No harm in mentioning that you'll probably allow people to use your work if they aren't in a position to pay for it or working for someone you don't like.

I would agree, but then it makes accepting outside contributions much trickier.

Creative-Commons-style license is usually not recommended for code

https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...

"We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available."

That's Creative Commons itself, by "Creative-Commons-style" I meant "something like, but not exactly CC itself".

I've looked around before, but I couldn't find anything like this (other than DIY-style licenses that may or may not have sufficient legalese to be enforceable)

If it's NC or ND-style it won't be a free software license.

> On the other hand, giving people an MIT license and saying "You can do whatever you want! Go nuts! Innovate!" is a boon to creativity. If some startup took my weekend project and made $1 billion off of it, good for them! That's the innovation that open-source is meant to encourage!

How does attribution-sharealike-noncommercial fit this case?

It sounds like he doesn't mind if some people (small startups) make money using his project, he just doesn't want anyone (large companies) to be able to.

There are 2 problems with this license.

1) Sometimes it is hard to tell, if an entity is regarded to be commercial or not. Is a hacker, who receives ad-money and donations a commercial entity? What about a university? It's unclear and therefore many won't touch your code.

2) The license may not be fully compatible with, MIT, BSD, Apache, etc license which also hinders integration.

Anyway, I would also welcome a license opening up your code for hackers and non-profits alike... Maybe someone knows?

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