in reply to Re: Licensing Revisited ... again and again.
in thread Licensing Revisited ... again and again.
Some programs have 'personal' and 'commercial' versions, whereby the one is free, and the other should be paid for, but none I know of say 'no use by commercial users' (what are commercial users, anyway?) - But maybe Im wrong, and there are such things.
Actually, that's a pretty common restriction. Off the top of my head, Netscape 3 and the old version of StarOffice (when it was still owned by StarDivision) were both free for non-commercial use (e.g., home use or in education, government, ...), but to use it in a business you needed to buy a license.
njudge (a derivative of the Ken Lowe adjudicator) is an example of software that's free for non-commercial use, but commercial use is utterly prohibited and licenses for that are just plain not available. (This is due to an informal agreement between the hobbyist community that maintains it and Avalon Hill / Hasbro, who own the rights to the game that the software implements.)
(The understanding is that Hasbro won't make legal trouble for the hobbyist game community provided nobody makes any money on it. In the true tradition of the Diplomacy game, this understanding is based on an agreement about what is in each party's best interests. Everyone involved agrees that it would not suit Hasbro's interests to make legal trouble for the hobby while nobody is making any money on it, and Hasbro understands that the hobby community would prefer not to risk upsetting that situation by allowing anyone to make a profit using the software.)
Both of these kinds of restrictions disqualify the software from meeting with OSD approval or being hosted on OSDN.
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