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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

I wish there were more standard open-but-not-open-source licenses available. Or open-but-only-for-personal-use or open-but-cannot-distribute.

Something standard and vetted enough that projects like these could adopt instead of having to write themselves.

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They didn’t really write this license themselves. It was Microsoft license that they slightly adapted after someone complained they couldn’t contribute.

The real issue here is that the product wasn’t open source despite being advertised as such. The licensed they used, Microsoft Reference Source License, isn’t an open source license. It’s more accurately described as “source available”. Ie you can view the source but you’re not really allowed to use it for anything.

The PolyForm Project has a set of standardized source-available licenses.

"The PolyForm Project is a group of experienced licensing lawyers and technologists developing simple, standardized, plain-language software source code licenses. PolyForm aims to fill gaps in the menu of standardized software licenses, like non-commercial, trial, and small-business-only terms."

https://polyformproject.org/

This is exactly what I meant. Thanks and bookmarked.

Creative Commons has standardized non-commercial and no-derivatives licences.

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/

This covers some of the use cases you describe.

CC recommends not using their licenses for software. Most of the reasoning is about not exactly matching Open Source concerns, but you're still in uncharted territory applying them to software even when Open Source is not the goal:

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

>I wish there were more standard open-but-not-open-source licenses available. Or open-but-only-for-personal-use or open-but-cannot-distribute.

Source Available. Something like Unreal or ONCE.

I think that label is also already taken, because "source availability" doesn't imply an ability to rebuild it from the source or even make a suggestion.

I guess there should be some compositional keywords for different aspects of non-F/OSS but not completely proprietary licenses. Source available, artifact buildable, artifact distributable under some conditions, etc.

Or Shared Source ?

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