Hey there,
I’m trying to figure out licenses. My problem is that I want to showcase or make a portfolio out of my small projects on Gitlab (so as a private person without commercial interests) but I also don’t want to the source code to be used commercially. (Yeah, I know. It’s kinda arrogant to think that anyone would be interested in such small projects, but indulge me please.) Something along these lines:
- Software is provided as is
- Use if you want
- Contribute if you want
- Don’t take credit
- Don’t sell
From what I read Creative Commons BY-NC(-SA) would be the goto but they advice against using it for software, since there are enough already (that’s the gist I got from it). Reading about software licenses I found the Common Clause that seems to be like what I want to have.
But here comes the catch: If I want to use for instance clap, how do I go about it? Clap has a dual license model from what I understand: Apache-2 and MIT. Are they even compatible with Common Clause? Can I use clap if I use Common Clause and provide the license for clap?
All this legalese is tiring and wearing me out. Can anybody help me, and perhaps ELI5?
Thank you.
I don’t think there are any OSS/FLOSS licenses that have non-commercial clauses, so CC NC is the best you can get among popular licenses.
When you use dependencies, your project (its users) must comply with all of the licenses together. IANAL, but I think CC and MIT (and other similarly permissive) licenses are compatible — you’ll need to include text of the permissive licenses to comply, and that’s not against CC.
If you take contributions, be clear what license they give you.