Submitting a new license or using the current ones

[Alex Rousskov]

On Thu, 6 May 2004 jcowan at reutershealth.com wrote:

> The most you can do is to make further releases of your software
> proprietary, which does expose you to the risk that a competitor
> will arise who will make further improvements to the old releases
> and distribute them under the old license or some other open source
> license.

Just to clarify, since Guilherme may be using different terminology:

You can keep the sources of your software open for user review (and
modification?) while prohibiting their redistribution.  To further
reduce the risk of lock up for your users, you can grant them the
right to redistribute if you fail to distribute yourself (e.g., your
project dies). You will need to write a license with the corresponding
terms. That license will never be OSI-approved because OSI requires
unlimited redistribution. You can still call your software "open
source", but OSI folks will not be happy about that.

Whether a serious competitor will arise using your LGPLed sources is
most likely unrelated to the licensing issue. Since you are going to
release the sources of your software (and allow modification?), it
seems to me that a competitor would have to do much more to survive
the competition than simply apply an OSI-approved license to your old
sources... Unless they have a sponsor who is determined to kill your
project on the grounds of OSI incompliance.

HTH,

Alex.
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