Hacker News Reader

Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

There are other licenses besides the GPL. And you can even make your own license. It's not at all uncommon for open source projects to have a "not for profit" clause attached to their copyright.

View on HN

I did not point you to the definition of copyleft or the definition of GPL, but to the definition of Free Software. If you read the definition of "Open Source" by OSI, or the DFSG by Debian, they're very similar and clear: the (royalty-free) license includes the right to make derivative work and publish/distribute the modifications.

None of the definitions above include "not for profit" clause as valid. If you have not for profit clause or non commercial or alike, it's NOT free software or "open source". (It's "freeware" or "shareware" or whatever.)

If you make your own license with such a clause, no one will consider it free or "open source." You can call it that way, but you'll just look foolish believe me.

Ah, I see, so you can take the trademarked name of any open source project and modify and distribute the software under that name, for profit, and everyone will be okay with it. Otherwise some people will think the vendor looks foolish. I see.

You're paraphrasing the parent, and seem to be confusing Open Source (which is a class of licenses) with trademarks.

You're right, HP still control the trademarks. But for a license to meet the Open Source Definition, there can be no 'non-commercial' restrictions.

So selling 'Foo' (derived from WebOS) is fine.But using the WebOS trademark isn't.

Just like Oracle distribute and sell support for 'Oracle Enterprise Linux' - 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux' is a trademark that belongs to Red Hat.

See CentOS; reduce sarcasm.

But is CentOS called "Red Hat"? No, it's called CentOS. With the comment I made, I was saying you wouldn't be able to release WebOS without HP's permission. Just like you can't release Red Hat without Red Hat's permission, so you fork it and use your own trademark.

That's a totally different matter which has nothing to do with what you were talking about earlier. Trademark and Free Software are two completely different things… (unlike copyright and patent law, where the code itself is directly licensed under copyright law and has to deal with patent law; however there is almost never a trademark license…)

None of the groups mentioned control the definition of "open source." I cannot control what looks foolish to you, but the phrase "open source" is tossed around a lot more casually on this site than you seem to believe.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

I think it would be more productive to promote the licenses whose values line up with your own than trying to police the language. For my part, I will keep pointing out the ridiculousness of saying "$neologism != $foo, because $blog_post says $nelogism = $bar."

The open source definition and free software definition both prohibit a "not for profit" clause. What is something that you consider to be an "open source project" that has such a clause?

http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

That's a good question. I thought Zed Shaw had licensed lamson under those terms, but I see nothing about that on his github right now.

While I can't find a use in the wild, an example of a license I would consider to be: * open source * prohibit for profit use is: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

You are welcome to say that creative commons is not open source (many people whose opinions I value highly feel that way), but it is commonly described in those terms (or at least it was when it first came out while I was in college).

Also, here is a plug for the world's greatest license (I'm tragically not affiliated with the author): http://davispj.com/2010/02/19/agpl-not-awesome-gpl.html

Open Source is not only about access to the source code, just like Free Software is not only about software price. By using these terms inappropriately, you only create misunderstanding and confusion, so please don't.

CC licenses are not supposed to be used as software licenses anyway.

I'm not trying to push a viewpoint--I'm trying to describe the current use of a phrase. How I feel about licenses does not change the way the phrase "open source" is used here and elsewhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com