Choosing the right license

[Charlie Stross]

On Thu, Nov 02, 2000 at 11:02:59AM +0000, David Johnson wrote:
> 
> If the license forbids charging customers for any service that is theirs to 
> provide then it will have a very tough time being approped as either OSS or 
> FS. To translate your wishes another way, you want "to make it difficult for 
> Redhat to include your software on its distribution".

That's not the goal. What I want to do is to make it unpalatable for
a company who wants to install the software on a public server
and charge the public for using it. Distributing the source code in
any way, or using it for your own purposes, is fine: I just don't
want to see it turned into a proprietary ASP.

I figure that ASPs like .NET are the next big threat to open source,
insofar as they lock customers into a vicious circle of renting their
applications while being unable to dig their data out and take it
elsewhere. I therefore want to deter people from using this software
as an ASP by requiring ASPs to make it glaringly obvious to users that
they're being charged for using something that's free. I don't care
about Redhat's distribution because they're not running the software
on a pay-per-use basis on behalf of the customer -- they're selling media
and support.

Any ideas?



-- Charlie