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arthurcolle parent
Why isn't there a "if I like you you can use it"

I like you @WalterBright you can use any of my stuff even if you get acquired

WalterBright
Thank you kindly!

There's not a whole lot of point to acquiring Boost licensed software. Of course, they could always acquire me and pay me handsomely!

limagnolia
Umm, there is. Basically, thats the default in most of the world. My recomendation if that is what you want to do, is to put a note in the readme and in LICENSE.txt that says "this project is copyright by me. If you want to use i, reach out to me and if I like you, I will give you a license". Then if you like someone, give them a written statement that you like them, and grant them permission to use your project(s), and under what terms, if any.
surgical_fire
I sort of like this. I wonder if it is enforceable.

"For my friends everything, for my enemies the law" software license.

ethmarks
> I wonder if it is enforceable.

I can't imagine that it wouldn't be. If a company has explicit written permission from the copyright owner granting permission to use that copyright, then they can use it.

Also, it wouldn't be a special license. If you wanted to do a "For my friends everything, for my enemies the law" thing, you'd just set it as all rights reserved and add special note encouraging people to ask for permission to use it.

Plus, copyright enforcement typically goes in the other direction. It's not about who you can sue, it's about who you can't. Licenses are just a way of specifying who you cannot sue. If you want everybody to use your project but don't want to bother with a license, you can make it all rights reserved (the legal default) and just not sue anybody. You could sue them if you wanted to (which is why nobody would ever use your code: because of the risk that you change your mind and sue them), but nobody is forcing you to.

t0mas88
Why would it not be enforceable? If you own the copyright on your software anybody that wants to use it has to get a license from you. The traditional way is for you to sell those licenses for money, but you could also decide to give them away based on how much you like the buyer.

Or a hybrid, sell them, but refuse to sell to certain entities and discount up to 100% to others based on how much you like them.

MagicMoonlight
Of course it is, that’s literally contract law. You’re agreeing a contract to licence them access with specific terms.

The reason they invented the standard licences is to avoid this cost and effort. Do you really want to write a 200 page legal contract for every user for software you’re giving away for free?

surgical_fire
Is that the implication? I thought that the legal contract you mentioned was a standard document, basically the same for everyone that was licensed. But I am not s lawyer, and I don't pretend to be one.

It would be neat to have this licese codified (Like we have MIT, GPL, etc), with the proper incentives to "ask for open source access, if I lile you, you might get it". And, of course, a "contract" that gave licensees the open source benefits.

limagnolia
One of the open source benefits is the ability to distribute the software to others under the open source license. So if you gave your friends an open source license (which you can do) they could then license the software to anyone else they want to under the same license (As that is part of the definition of open source). If you want to restrict them from doing this, you could make your own custom license that restricts this (but it would not be open source).

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