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

[Pamela Chestek]

It is an interesting thought experiment about what the reaction would be 
if the latitude was given for something offensive, like scammers, rather 
than a group that we are generally sympathetic too.

Pam

Pamela S. Chestek
Chestek Legal
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pamela at chesteklegal.com
www.chesteklegal.com


On 8/6/2026 10:48 AM, Bruce Perens via License-discuss wrote:
> 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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