alt Hacker Newsauthor here! the decision was mine; if anything, the senior leadership was fine with an unencumbered open-source license. What I didn't want was someone using it to make a business out of this tool without me in the mix.
In a sense, a futile effort; because if you reverse engineer a nlspec and rebuild it, then you can have it with any license you may want.
Replies
hungryhobbit • today at 7:51 PM
Terrible decision.
OSS licenses (and existing commercial ones) are tried and true (and re-used) for a reason, while your license very well may not even hold up in court!
I mean, I'm not a lawyer, and I assume you aren't either ... would you hire someone who isn't a programmer to write your code for you? Then why are you doing your own lawyering without a law degree?
I wasn't doubting it wasn't you making the decision! :)
I was more curious why go with modifying a FOSS license (which clearly isn't the right choice if you want to prevent others from doing whatever with it) instead of just straight up keeping full copyright to yourself/the company and a "regular" license?
Then you get exactly what you want, without also sending double-messages about that people can do whatever they want, which is what you're trying to prevent.