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Re:Entrepreneurship for Engineers: Selling Open Source Software by aleph_minus_one on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @04:49PM (#37139123)
> 2. Copy-paste a new license to your repositories - You relicense your software to use a slightly modified version of MIT license, which requires commercial entities to pay for your software (5 minutes or so)

Then the software is not open source anymore, i.e. the claim that one sells open source software is fraudulent.

Side remark: In the past Microsoft attempted to establish the term "shared source" for software where you can see the source code, but which is not open source.

Re:Entrepreneurship for Engineers: Selling Open Source Software by nonethewiser on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @05:20PM (#37139419)
> the claim that one sells open source software is fraudulent

Fraud requires intent to deceive. Your conclusion seems very alarmist and unfair.

Re:Entrepreneurship for Engineers: Selling Open Source Software by pessimizer on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @06:12PM (#37139948)
The rules about open source aren't mysterious or hidden, and anyone who has spent time rewriting the MIT license and creating a marketplace for open source software is either familiar with them or incompetent.
Re:Entrepreneurship for Engineers: Selling Open Source Software by yu3zhou4 on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @05:04PM (#37139273)
Thanks for the remark. On the marketplace I call it "paid open source software", so I guess I could be more specific in original comment, sorry for unclearness from my side
Re:Entrepreneurship for Engineers: Selling Open Source Software by aleph_minus_one on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @05:15PM (#37139369)
> On the marketplace I call it "paid open source software"

This is still wrong (and likely again fraudulent, but IANAL), since the software is not open source if there are such usage restrictions. Call it, for example, "paid sofware with source available" ("source available" is another common term for software for which one can see the source code, but which is not open source).

Re:Entrepreneurship for Engineers: Selling Open Source Software by pessimizer on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @06:18PM (#37140019)
1) Simply don't call it "open source software." Making up new definitions for open source is more harmful to it than anything else could be. There's nothing to open source except licensing.

2) The usual way to do this is to AGPL your software (or be even stricter), and sell it by relicensing it for businesses who pay you so they can use it how they wish. You don't have to make up a new "non-commercial open source" license to do this.

edit: It feels like OSS people are haphazardly stumbling through the thought processes that lead to the GPL in the first place. Once you've made an open source license that doesn't allow people to make money using the software, does it matter whether they share their changes or not when they distribute?

What's motivating people to reserve the right not to share changes in the software they distribute for free, other than to maintain a now enforced as worthless (by this particular license and similar variants) distinction from the GPL?

Re:Entrepreneurship for Engineers: Selling Open Source Software by doesnt_know on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @06:24PM (#37140078)
The established term is "source available" specifically because it's not open source.