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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

I'd like a standard license which is like the GPL, plus you can't bundle it into anything with ads or spyware, interpreted broadly. This would prevent things such as SourceForge's malware installer wrapper.

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It sounds like a good idea. But it would not meet the FSF definition of Free Software, nor the OSI definition of Open Source. So you wouldn't be able to include it in many open source software packages.

"malware"/"spyware" is complicated. Does Ubuntu count as spyware? They have some integration with Amazon web shops. Does Debian? It has a "popularity contest" for packages ( http://popcon.debian.org/ ).

Though Debian's "popularity contest" is opt-in.

Yes it is. And so is a lot of malware. The user has clicked the "I Agree" box at the start.

Can you come up with a definition of "malware" that excludes actual malware and excludes the Debian popularity contest?

I'm supposing that you meant "includes actual malware". Here's a definition:

Malware, for a given user and computer, is installed software that, in the absence of constraints (such as imperfect information, limited time and ability), would not be installed.

This defines malware as a space rather than a binary, but I'm fine with that.

Ohhh, now there's a good idea. I'd like something like MIT but with the same clause. Maybe someone with a better grasp of legalese can draft a common "don't use this in your shitty deceptive/scammy software" clause we can put at the end of any other license?

IANAL, but I believe you may find this is more trouble then it's worth. I like the idea, but if you add such a clause to your software's license, then your software won't be able to be included in other software that has the same license as your's unless they also amend their license (Which may be impossible to do).

IE. If you license your code, project A, with 'GPLv3 + no-stupid-software', and project B wants to use your code but they're licensed as 'GPLv3', legally they can't because the licenses are incompatible. Project B would have to amend their license to add the 'no-stupid-software' clause to make it compatible with project A (But of course doing that may introduce other license incompatibilities with other pieces of software, and projects with a decent number of contributors probably don't have much of an option to change license at this point).

I don't know if there would be any incompatibilities going the other direction: You want to use project B in your software, and project B has the license 'GPLv3' but your software has the license 'GPLv3 + no-stupid-software'. I think that should be ok, assuming that clause doesn't conflict with anything already in the GPL, but again, IANAL.

Mozilla does that by keeping the trademark for Firefox and the logo and only allowing the distribution of vanilla packages using them.

Trademarks are expensive and take effort, though, so this is not a model for small maintainers.

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