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TL;DR: There are no good licenses and everything is terrible. Computers were a mistake.
I've been looking for a good software license for a while, 'good' here means not associated with Free Software Foundation/Richard Stallman, but also not allowing large companies or the military to capitalise on my work. I've also had issues in the past with individuals taking my free software and selling it, Stallman fans/FOSS types always have a response to this kind of thing which is usually based in some kind of defense of capitalism (whether they think so or not). For a while I've been using the European Union Public Licence which is compatible with the GPL but that still allows commercial reuse, I used this because it didn't have the stigma of Richard Stallman attached to it so felt more inclusive.
I also want to license various Oppen output in different ways, Skiss for example is a library, use of Skiss in a commercial product is fine (but I really want some ethical control over which products). Ariane however I want to be free (as in free, not as in free software and the various manglings of the term that the free software movement have attached to it). Ariane should be free for use, free to modify, fork, customise, but absolutely not free to sell in any way without explicit consent. Again, while researching this over the years I've noticed that anyone wanting to do this is hounded down by the open source community. This is farcical because it it allows entities such as ICE to use your open source software:
There's a good comparison of licenses at the link below, the sole license there that doesn't allow commercial reuse is Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0), which has a note attached: 'Note that the prohibition of commercial use is - in general - not an "Open" good practice.'. That's okay, I'm not interested in being part of the open source community which welcomes commercial reuse, I've no interest in being FSF-approved or OSI-approved.
JLA - Find and compare software licenses
Creative Commons seems like a good fit and I used it for years in my youth when running a netlabel, but MP3s/artwork and sofware are very different, Creative Commons have this to say:
We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses listed as free by the Free Software Foundation and listed as open source by the Open Source Initiative.
Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?
Using CC0 for public domain software
There's various projects around that aim to address the above concerns, some more robust and professional than others but all coming from the same idea and all likely utterly unenforceable:
The Cooperative Software License
The Anti-Capitalist Software License
Fuck Around and Find Out License
The Fuck Around and Find Out License while not meant for serious use does allow the creator to define the extent to which they want to impose their ethics on people who want to reuse the project, see Postscript below. But commercial entities will still freely use code using this license if they want, they'll just say their ethics align even if they don't, it's unenforceable.
Public-private licenses used to be common, until the Free Software Foundation bullied everyone into using their model instead. License Zero is an attempt to bring them back but seem to have some internal politics or rebranding going on, or the people behind it have lost interest:
The problem with these types of licenses is that it allows popular tooling to become controlled by a commercial entity. As I understand it this is the situation with Qt; free software is free to use Qt, commercial use must negogiate an exception. As a small developer this kind of license sounds attractive and alleviates lots of concerns, but also as a small developer I'm put off from using Qt by the commercial messaging by the controlling organisation.
I have no interest in belonging to these institutions. I develop code, I love it, I don't want people to profit from my work. A lot of people in these communities are toxic to the point where a commerical license would feel more ethical. I've been a commercial developer as a day job for around 20 years, I've been writing free software side projects all the way through that time, poor quality as a junior, middling quality now as a veteran.
There are no good licenses and everything is terrible. Computers were a mistake. Despite what the Foss-types say when they try to lecture you for not using GNU you're under no obligation to do so, by using GNU you're allowing commercial code re-use by Google, the military, or anyone else. I've read some critisisms of this kind of cooperative thinking that say the likes of Google will just rewrite stuff in-house - of course they will, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have principles.
You yourself must also abide by the licences of any 3rd party code you use in your work and your license needs to take that into account. If possible it's better to not rely on 3rd party libraries (outside of commercial projects, this isn't a Not-Invented-Here (NIH) scenario, for $dayjob projects I'll happily use any dependency I can that'll make life easier).
The themes discussed here are all better investigated at the link below:
Here's Linus with some exceptional clarity when challenged for not adopting GPL3:
Linus Torvalds says GPL v3 violates everything that GPLv2 stood for
Heading this one off now: yes, I know Google won't use works licensed as AGPL:
Other links found after writing this:
A discussion on this theme on the coops.tech forum
and another about ethical source
This post has pissed off the right people. There seems to be a common binary attitude from a lot of people that can be summarised like so: Open source == freedom for the military and police to use it and that's okay, but at the same time: None open source == you're as bad as Microsoft and Google.