Hacker News Reader

Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

The gist of that license seems to be:

- you can use this software for free at home for personal use

- if you use it at work, you can try it out for free but you have to pay to really use it

- we welcome your code submissions, which will hopefully grow our license revenue

I feel like there are already licenses out there that hit these major points. If I ran across software that used this license, I would recommend they use one of the other popular licenses or just dual-license.

In general, I want licenses to be written and vetted by lawyers.

View on HN

> In general, I want licenses to be written and vetted by lawyers.

I want them to be so standardized that I don't have to read them. If the license doesn't match something I already know, I'd be reluctant to include the code in any of my projects.

yes, i totally agree - as much as i like the terms of my license, if i came across an interesting software that used the license, i probably wouldn't try it out just because the cost of understanding any new license is too high.

i've more or less given up on the software that I intended the license for, but i mention license here in the hopes that one of these open-core companies will create, vet and popularize a license with similar assurances

thanks for taking a look. yes, having to pay for use at scale is one of the key features (though perhaps the scale should be 1000 cores instead of 10). for your 3rd bullet, one key feature is that the code submission can likewise include a cost, ie it's symmetric

i'm not familiar with any commercial licenses that are close, but i'm interested. do you have any links or suggestions ?

The way I wrote it, it should be more obvious that this isn't an open-source license per se.

What you want a commercial software where you offer exceptions to certain classes of users. Sometimes, this is called dual-licensing. But overall, the controlling license for use of the software is necessarily a proprietary license of some kind.

i chose the name "Paid Use Permissive License" thinking that that would make it clear that it's not Open Source. but i'll see if there's any way that i can make it more obvious

which class of users do you see as receiving exceptions ? one of my goals in writing it was to limit (via the assurances) the degree to which an owner could segment a market, eg it requires published prices, and if they provide low-cost licenses to one user, that user can resell them

I'm not sure who your audience is. If I'm shipping software under a commercial license of some kind (like your license), I want my attorney to vet the license for my jurisdiction(s) before I use it. My attorney would likely not choose this license (because it's not written by an attorney, and does not have features attorneys would expect to see in a software license).

If I'm selling software, I would generally expect it to be licensed under a bespoke license. This doesn't fit that need.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com