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A Software License That's Libre But Not Gratis?

Posted by kdawson on from the give-the-customer-what-he-wants dept.

duncan bayne writes "My company is developing some software using Ruby. It's proprietary software — decidedly not free-as-in-beer — but I don't want to tie my customers down with the usual prohibitions on reverse engineering, modification, etc. After all, they're licensing the product from us, so I think they should be able to use it as they see fit. Does anyone know of an existing license that could be used in this case? Something that gives the customer the freedom to modify the product as they want, but prohibits them from creating derivative works, or redistributing it in any fashion?"

4 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No by stinerman · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    And I should have read the story. It's late on the east coast.

  2. Re:slashdot legal advice? by seanadams.com · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Dude... you absolutely rock, I love my duet and will be buying a boom soon. A very happy customer

    Kind words, thank you! :)

  3. It depends who you are by dbIII · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    If you are a big project like X11 or OpenBSD you can use whatever licence you like.

    If you are a small project like Qt with your own open licence you could get hounded for years no matter how much you change it and even after you change it to GPL there will be a bit of bad press. Even if you use the GPL but don't want to go to a newer version until you read it's final form you could have people ranting at you.

    So in reality the answer comes down to human nature and whether you'll get noticed or ignored by people that are looking for an example to use to push their own personal politics.

  4. Re:slashdot legal advice? by WindBourne · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    It is interesting, but I think that you have missed a HUGE market. Built-in devices.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.