Port restrictions: Redistribution for profit is not permitted.

Chuck Swiger cswiger at mac.com
Sun Feb 8 13:37:30 PST 2004


Constantine wrote:
> As a university student, I am considering to be a FreeBSD maintainer of 
> some programming language developed by my professor. He has certain 
> restrictions on his work --- "Redistribution for profit is not 
> permitted." --- he does not want anyone to be able to change a few lines 
> in his code and sale it for profit. :-)
[ ... ]
 > Is there any way to keep the original licence ("Redistribution for
 > profit is not permitted."), but still include the software on the discs
 > and ftp? Otherwise, there is really no reason to create this port...

Hello--

You and your professor might want to review the following license, and see 
whether it suits your needs:

http://www.pkix.net/~chuck/Licenses/NRL.html [ ...or: ]
http://www.pkix.net/~chuck/Licenses/ENRL.html

This is BSD-derived, but not an OSI-approved Open Source license[1].  However, 
this license explicitly permits FreeBSD, Linux et al, and CD vendors to 
redistribute your software as a precompiled package.

-- 
-Chuck

[1]: Your requirement to restrict "for profit" redistribution is in opposition 
to OSD #1.  Without taking some care, such a restriction also prevents vendors 
of "free" software and CD redistributors from redistributing your software. 
Anyway, the approximate upshot of using the NRL or something similar is that:

a) you won't have to set RESTRICTED in the port or a Linux RPM,
b) people won't be able to resell your software without permission,
c) ...which means that some people may not use the software at all,
d) you won't be able to host such software on SourceForge or its ilk.


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