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Comment by alexchamberlain | Hacker News Reader

The licence seems messed up. You can opt to use an MIT licence, but only if you're noncommercial or you pay. The MIT licence explicitly states that the software is provided free of charge, and can be sublicensed, so anyone with an MIT copy, can give it away for free.

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That alone makes me not want to use it. Licensing has to be clean and clear for it to have any chance with me.

It’s valid. It’s not the MIT license, but it’s not messed up or confused either. It’s just an unusual license.

It means you don’t have to GPL your own code while your project is non-commercial and you aren’t paying for it. If you decided to make your project comercial you could migrate away from it or pay for it. It also seems to have a loophole if you interpret it a certain way and transfer it, because the person agreeing and the person receiving it under the MIT license would be different people.

Couldn't someone just download it from some third party mirror and use it under the MIT license?

Not unless they first removed the other part of the license for this mirror, which to me it seems the MIT license allows you to do. That said, I don't think most want to use open source under a loophole. So such a mirror isn't that likely to take off.

Yeah, the more common pattern is to simply ignore the license :)

Can't tell you how many developers I run into who presume anything source-available is fair game, install it with their dependency manager, and move on without even reading the license.

Could you imagine if software companies required legal to review every change to `package.json` or `requirements.txt`?

Yes, I can imagine. We simply don't install packages. And I'm pretty sure there is a whole review process if you do want to install one. And then it gets checked into the monorepo. It does not get to be randomly updated via a package manager, ever.

Yeah maybe I'll look into a simpler licensing as it may indeed be confusing and just drop the requirement, it's not like I really planned to make money with it anyways.

While I doubt this project will ever reach the popularity of projects such as docker, terraform, mondogb, wordpress, corejs, and many others, I'd like to avoid having issues that they encountered later due to their licensing.

Basically having companies that could afford to contribute and help maintainers but that choose to not do it just for pure greed, while keeping it free for everyone else that continue to make open project or just non-profit/personal use case.

As I'm no legal expert, the intention may not have been very clear in the wording though

It's certainly confusing as presented, both for MIT-plus-restrictions, and the dual licensing.

For a lawyer's opinion on those two things, see:

https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/21/MIT-for-Noncommerc...

https://writing.kemitchell.com/2023/09/10/Two-Kinds-Dual-Lic...

On the bright side, you need to pay only $1+, if you are using it commercially. Seems a reasonable ask and a nice way to support the development. Interesting approach to licensing indeed, but I wouldn't call it messed up. It's just new.

New is an immediate "nope" to a whole lot of people when it comes to legal risk.

It's messed up if it's not legally enforceable.

Yeah, you probably don't want to license under MIT for proprietary use cases. You could take inspiration from the Qt project for how they do this.

It takes one "non-commercial" project to release their code and people can use the MIT licensed version without restriction.

The concept of non-commercial itself is shady: what if someone releases something non commercially, and then someone else uses it commercially?

You probably want to get rid of this, it's complex to understand and to apply. You could have:

- an AGPLv3 version that open source projects will be able to use (commercially or not, there are many successful commercial open source projects)

- a custom proprietary license that someone can use only if they pay, and de facto their project cannot be open source

Of course, this also means that your code can't be used by projects that want to be released under the MIT license. People will need to release under the AGPLv3.

Yeah, that's a mess. The MIT license thing with additional limits just doesn't make sense.

I suggest licensing under both AGPL and an existing, documented source-available license - maybe BUSL? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License

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