[License-discuss] For Discussion: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 with NonCommercial Exception

[Bruce Perens]

The field-of-endeavor terms of the OSDs seem to be the ones that people
have the most problems with, which is ironic since the goal is
anti-discrimination. I wrote this term into the OSD not only in response to
the various freeware licenses that restricted commercial use, but
specifically because of my experience with the license of Berkeley SPICE at
the time. This license restricted use of this electronic circuit simulation
program by the Police of South Africa. This was an "ethical" license, like
all of the so-called "ethical" licenses to follow it, and like them was
both impossible of enforcement (because of a problem in lawsuits against
sovereign powers that even some of the most prominent lawyers associated
with OSI at the time did not seem to understand) and problematic in its
discrimination, especially because by the time we wanted to put SPICE in
Debian the police of South Africa were 50% black and Apartheid had been
defeated for white a while, yet the license term stood! I wrote to a
license executive at University of California and got no help, obviously I
have better contacts there today and they know what Open Source is now :-)
But the nature of inappropriate "legacy discrimination" in well-meaning
licenses that just got stale, and the potential for pro-life and pro-choice
licenses led me to think that Debian (and then Open Source) should be a
neutral ground where people of different opinions could put them aside to
make great software. The sentiment stands today.

I don't think discriminatory release fromn terms, rather than imposition of
extra ones, would be that harmful, but we have had 30 years of Open Source
without even much (if any) discussion of a need for it, so I doubt it's
necessary. We have always had an approved way of doing it, which is to use
two licenses and give the user a choice, the discriminatory license not
being OSI certified, and the non-discriminatory license in this case
already is.

    Thanks

    Bruce

On Mon, Aug 3, 2026 at 7:52 AM Kevin P. Fleming via License-discuss <
license-discuss at lists.opensource.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 3, 2026, at 09:00, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
> > On 8/2/26 18:21, Shao Kai via License-discuss wrote:
> >>    1. Does the non-commercial exemption as defined in the additional
> >>       permission raise any concerns regarding OSD Section 6 (No
> >>       Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor)?
> >
> > Yes, unequivocally. It's stated in
> > https://opensource.org/licenses/common-reasons-for-rejection-of-licenses
> >
> > I haven't processed the other questions.
>
> That was my additional reaction too, but I'm willing to consider that
> 'additional permissions' may be acceptable on a field-of-endeavor basis
> where 'fewer permissions' are not, as long as the baseline set of
> permissions would otherwise be compatible with the OSD.
>
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-- 
Bruce Perens K6BP
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