[License-discuss] licenses for hosted services

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Miles Fidelman (mfidelman at meetinghouse.net):

> There are those who disagree, myself included.  (And what makes
> Engel Nyst the last word on such matters?)

As I'm sure you are aware, I merely meant that Mr. Nyst expressed my
view well enough that it would be redundant effort to write up the same
viewpoint twice.

> I'm not talking about any restrictions on distributing the software.

OSD #6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

Restricting commercial use is the canonical example of discrimination
against fields of endeavour.  In a large sense, open source was actually
a reaction against the sort of 'academic licensing' typified by COPS,
pgp after early days, SSH Communications Security Ltd.'s SSH 2.x, and
many other codebases that permits gratis use for non-commercial purposes
and imposes a mandatory fee for any for-profit usage.

You have more than adequate standard solutions already, such as those
Engel Nyst described, such as (1) dual-licensing with a copyleft licence
and a proprietary one, or (2) licenses such as was used by Aladdin
Ghostscript where code is proprietary-only for a set period of time and
then becomes open source (or where the last-but-one release becomes open
source).

If you cannot make your business work with that and need outright
proprietary terms for commercial users, then good luck to you, but
you're simply not doing open source.

I see nothing to discuss, here. 

Either do open source, or I don't see how you're going to get help from
OSI.