Thank you, this clarifies a lot. On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 12:19 AM, John Cowan <co...@mercury.ccil.org> wrote: > > > the Non-Profit Open Software License [1] has non-profit amendment which > > discriminates against for-profit, i.e. commercial use. > > Actually it simply forbids redistribution by commercial entities, not use.
I see. My confusion was from 17a) "Licensor ...declares that it is a not-for-profit organization" which I interpreted as the basic requirement with the additional requirement "derives no revenue... from the distribution..." > > It seems to me that this clear violates the Open Source Definition > > [2] because it discriminates against a specific field of endeavor. Can > > somebody please explain to me why OSI lists the license as open source > > [3]? Is there something I'm missing? > > It's because everything licensed under the NPOSL is automatically licensed > under the OSL as well, which unquestionably is an open-source license. This was not clear to me but now I see it from the "otherwise" sentence in 17d) "Otherwise, You shall distribute... under the OSL..." > So if a commercial entity wishes to redistribute code (modified or > not) that it receives under the NPOSL, it may do so under the OSL. This was unknown concept to me in open source licensing. Now I see, also from Rosen's document [4], that the point of NPOSL are the different warranties for non-profit organizations. > This does not quite violate OSD #3, because the license is not pure > NPOSL but NPOSL+OSL. Good point, I didn't caught that. > But it's a marginal case, and perhaps it wouldn't > be approved today. Certainly the confusion would be one reason. How I got to this was that I wanted to write somewhere that if the license is on OSI list, the software can be used commercially. Just to check myself, I went to the page with the list and I see "Non-Profit... License" which I haven't noticed before. Thanks again, Vaclav [4] http://rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0-explained.htm
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