Ask HN: How to open-source to friends but not to enemies?
I want to open-source the tech, but I don't want it to be used for malicious purposes
"5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research."
Source: https://opensource.org/osd
Feel free to use some other license if it suits your needs or purposes. It is your software, license it how you want to.
Some considerations: https://geekflare.com/software-license/
- This license is only open source in spirit, but technically not really due to this restriction.
- who defines what is malicious? The mouse thinks the cat is a monster, but the cat is only playing catch with a self-moving fur ball...
Alternatively you can go the Red Hat way: the GPL license says that the source should be distributed along with the binary. If you don't distribute the binary of your application, you don't have to give the source to anyone. Red Hat gives the binary to its subscribers (friends), along with the source. If they see that one of their customer has leaked the source, the contract can be terminated. One might be inclined to ask however how much is it different from a closed source distribution model.
Most Open Source licenses (famously GPL) can make life pretty miserable on downstream corporate users, if that's your imperative. But if licensing as a whole has taught us anything it's all just data at the end of the day.
What you can do is write your friends great licenses and hope they do the right things.
That is a lot of work, and it is not really open in the sense that has all the value.