On Thu, 6 May 2004 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > The most you can do is to make further releases of your software > proprietary, which does expose you to the risk that a competitor > will arise who will make further improvements to the old releases > and distribute them under the old license or some other open source > license.
Just to clarify, since Guilherme may be using different terminology: You can keep the sources of your software open for user review (and modification?) while prohibiting their redistribution. To further reduce the risk of lock up for your users, you can grant them the right to redistribute if you fail to distribute yourself (e.g., your project dies). You will need to write a license with the corresponding terms. That license will never be OSI-approved because OSI requires unlimited redistribution. You can still call your software "open source", but OSI folks will not be happy about that. Whether a serious competitor will arise using your LGPLed sources is most likely unrelated to the licensing issue. Since you are going to release the sources of your software (and allow modification?), it seems to me that a competitor would have to do much more to survive the competition than simply apply an OSI-approved license to your old sources... Unless they have a sponsor who is determined to kill your project on the grounds of OSI incompliance. HTH, Alex. -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3