Clarification regarding MIT license

[vfonic]

I'd like to point out that this is not necessarily true:

Your modifications remain open-source

MIT license allows users of software to modify and keep modifications closed-source.

The license that would demand to open source modifications and the rest of the software, would be GPL license.

https://github.com/IanLunn/Hover/blob/master/README.md#personalopen-source

[itsjavi]

Under "Licenses" it also says you can't sell a copy ("Your application can't be sold"), a statement that is incompatible with the MIT license, which explicitly allows you to: use, copy, "modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software": https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

So I would say this project is incompatible with MIT and basically any Open Source license.
Any license that prohibits selling is by definition not Open Source.

[darrena092]

I also wanted to ask about this.

You specifically state in the readme that the Personal/Open Source edition must not be used in commercial projects, yet the licence linked to at https://ianlunn.co.uk/store/licenses/personal/ specifically states that it is okay to sell copies of the software.

IMO there's nothing wrong with requiring a payment to use an open source project in commercial software - everyone has the right to ask for compensation for their work, but I just think that you're leaving yourself open to people not paying you and arguing unclear licensing as a justification.

[IanLunn]

Thanks all. I'll look to address this in the near future and will most likely move to dual-license under GPL. The idea as @darrena092 pointed out is that if you make money by selling your application with Hover.css then their should be compensation for it.

[Addvilz]

Mandatory legal disclaimer: I am not your attorney, and this is not a piece of legal advice. Consult your attorney for your specific case.

@IanLunn TL;DR - you can't enforce your commercial licensing. Anyone is free to do whatever they want however they want to this point and till you change the license terms for this project.

Unfortunately, licensing does not generally work the way you tried to apply it. You can't take a permissive (non-sticky) license, apply it to a project and then exclude a group of users from it, and still state that you license the project under that permissive license - you either explicitly modify the license or you use license verbatim. In this case, you have applied the MIT license verbatim to a specific group of users.

Doing so opens a very specific loophole - anyone can download a copy of this software to inspect it, review it or whatever - personal and non-commercial use applies once done so.

That allows anyone to (permanently) transfer this copy of the software to a commercial project because MIT license explicitly permits doing so. Once someone has obtained the software for personal use, MIT license comes into force for that someone.

to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so [...]

Because of this, even when you explicitly say that you only apply MIT license for non-commercial use, you can't stop someone from actually applying MIT license terms once they become effective and from transferring the software to someone (something) else because MIT permits it. Once that is done, your exceptions are no longer applicable - because your exceptions are outside of the license itself and those exceptions only apply to the first party who obtained the software. Nothing legally prevents that party to transfer the software further under the terms of MIT license.

For all intents and purposes, you have one and only one option - relicense the next release of the code to modify the license text of the MIT license itself to include the non-commercial use exceptions - the license will not be MIT license any longer, but an MIT-alike license with your specific exceptions. Or use GPL + commercial license.

[rubyFeedback]

I think GPL may lead to less confusion, at the least in the correct wording, e. g. this part in particular:

"Your modifications remain open-source"

This is very typical of GPL and, in my opinion, the key difference towards MIT/BSD style. The GPL is strict, so people are required to make available their modifications, whereas the MIT style variant does not have such a requirement (and is thus less strict). Different licences have different use cases and I am fine either way, but I believe it may indeed be simpler to use a GPL variant if the above wording is retained.

For monetary aspects perhaps donations may be more useful, e. g. when projects feel they are using many effects and want to partially compensate for the time investment and effort to make the project available.

[vfonic]

I think the closest you can get to what you want is MIT and a statement similar to this one:

if you make money by selling your application with Hover.css then their should be compensation for it.

I'd change this to this:

if you make money by selling your application with Hover.css then consider compensating the author of this software.

It's not the same as it's more loose and makes it optional to compensate. Since the compensation terms are not even defined (what if someone makes $1M?, can they send you $1 and say they've compensated you?)

Maybe you need some other, commercial license? CC or similar?

/in order to avoid all this complication I suggest MIT + "if you make money, please appreciate my time and buy me a coffee"