Non-distributable Free Software?
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Many proprietary software is kept closed-source for the sake of keeping the company's assets from being copied/redistributed. Could a license be made in which an application is open-source, can be edited by the person who purchased it, but they are (legally) unable to distribute. Any changes or modifications made to the code could be separately published and distributed still (without the entire program). This would violate freedoms 2 and 3, but be a compromise for any business/individual stuck in a non-free environment. Thoughts?
This sounds like the Q Public License[1] to me.
I didn't realize such a license already existed. I'm wondering why many companies don't use something like this instead of completely closed-sourcing their programs. Thanks for telling me!
Stallman and the FSF were able to bring a lot of pressure to bear on organizations trying to use licenses like this who wanted their packages accepted into the GNU/Linux ecosystem. For example, Netscape originally had a license which allowed them to redistribute code contributed to Mozilla, but did not allow for contributors to redistribute it. They were ultimately pushed into relicensing firefox under a GPL-compatible license. Qt was originally licensed with the Q Public License, meaning that there was a cloud over early versions of KDE, but pressure caused them to reconsider and they changed to a dual license program for awhile that allowed redistribution of code.
Also, redistribution is not the only concern - one of the biggest concerns is that code gets mixed and anyone licensing under a GPL-compatible license has to avoid mixing any incompatibly licensed code in their project. Mixing incompatible code into a GPL-compatible project can force a licensing change on the project.
I see, I suppose the code mixing part will be complicated. This was kind of a shower-thought for me, I didn’t expect such a detailed response, so thanks! It’s probably better that free software and proprietary are not intertwined.
It's a great question and one that has been the major emphasis of the FSF and Stallman for over 30 years. It's at the core of why a libre distro like Trisquel needs to exist. Browsing through this FSF page on licensing is very enlightening - https://www.gnu.org/licenses
That's what I love about Trisquel. I'll most likely not go through any of the source code for Trisquel personally but simply the fact that it is open-source means that someone somewhere independent from the dev-team will go through the source.
The title is self defeating. Non-distributable software is not free software.
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