[Discuss] licensing with some exclusivity in hardware

Justin Mclean justin at classsoftware.com
Wed Jun 29 13:42:55 UTC 2016


Hi,

My licensing experience is more in the open source software world and interestingly a number of open source licenses require no restriction of use. For instance any license that includes a restriction of use i.e. this software can only be use on a certain platform or can’t be used in a certain field of endeavour is not compatible with the Apache 2.0 software license. [1][2] If you want to use it in an unethical way or even for “evil" go ahead the license actually allows it, but if you do it’s unlikely you’ll build a community around it.

OS software has copyright protection (unlike OS hardware in most cases) but the main purpose of any license is to communicate the intent to how the licensed product can be used, copied, modified, distributed etc ect but it can't enforce that. It certainly doesn’t stop (some) people from violating the license terms and doing what they want, but they are likely to find it's not sustainable from a business or community point of view to do so.

Justin

1.http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#criteria
2.http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-x


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