There is a health app that is very important to sufferers of a specific disease and it is freemium and I find this detestable. I am doing a clean room rewrite of it in its entirety and plan to release it on fdroid. Is there a license that prevents some ghoul from forking it to profit from people’s misfortunes? I am trying to avoid legal issues by being clean room but will try to keep my publishing of the app as anonymous as possible regardless. Thanks
None. You’d need a custom license. All open source licenses follow the Open Source definition, of which:
Rule 1: Free Redistribution The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
Rule 6: No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
And really rule 4: Integrity of The Author’s Source Code The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of “patch files” with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.
Now anyone that does fork it to add such unwanted features still must follow the other parts of your open source license, so GPL is still best since people can just strip out the added-on features later since they’d be, theoretically, obligated to open source their fork… but the entire framework of open source software is built on the concept of ‘I make a thing, whatever you do with it is your problem as long as you agree to that same term.’
This
Decompilation is not clean room. Ckean room is when one group of people write a spec of functionality of an existing product and the other group in the clean room have no access or functional knowledge of existing app.
Also foss is about fresom not restrictions.
That being said. There are licenses that require forks to also be open source
There isn’t one, for multiple reasons.
First of all, as @vagrancyand already mentioned, the restrictions you want violate the rules of Open Source (or Free Software, for that matter).
Second, there is no such thing as a “clean room decompilation.” That’s still a derivative work of the closed-source thing you’re “decompiling,” which means it’s just copyright infringement with extra steps. You don’t have the right to relicense it in the first place.
Using AI to “free” proprietary software may look like a popular thing to do right now because tech moves faster than the lawyers do, but all these projects are going to get sued out of existence sooner or later.
copyright infringement
I do like copyright infringement
Sure, fuck copyright. But you said you were trying to avoid legal issues, so the only responsible advice is “don’t do what you’re thinking of doing.”
Hey there is always some legal wizardry for rich people maybe there is one for being a good person
Not unless you also have a lot of money.
Which usually means the “good person” part doesn’t apply, anyway.
LOL, good one!
Some folks are saying that decompiling violates copyright law. I can’t speak to any jurisdictions other than the U.S… (And for that matter, IANAL and this isn’t legal advice, so really I can’t speak with any authority to U.S. copyright law. I’ve read a bit on the topic, but that’s the most I can say.) But I think that’s at best an oversimplification.
A court case that dealt fairly directly with the question of whether decompiling violates copyright law was Sega v. Accolade. Just to hedge further, court cases are very fact specific and a lot of caution should be exercised when applying that ruling to a different case. Also, it’s possible that in the future, a court could simply overturn the previous ruling. However, in that case, the courts found that:
We conclude that where disassembly is the only way to gain access to the ideas and functional elements embodied in a copyrighted computer program and where there is a legitimate reason for seeking such access, disassembly is a fair use of the copyrighted work, as a matter of law.
(Yes, it uses the term “disassembly” there, but the plaintiff, Sega Enterprises LTD (yes that Sega), but the Wikipedia page appears to interpret that to include decompilation. As the Wikipedia page says: “Accolade’s decompilation of the Sega software constituted fair use.”)
All that is not necessarily to say that “decompiling is legal”. There are other parts of law which in one specific circumstance or another might make decompilation “illegal”. For instance, an EULA might forbid decompilation. (A lot of EULA’s do just that.)
So, I guess the moral of the story is: to find out whether decompilation is legal or not in a given case, seek legal advice from a lawyer.
Sorry that didn’t really speak to your actual question, but I believe the folks who are saying that what you’re describing couldn’t qualify as an Open Source license are correct.
Look into Creative Commons Non-Commercial/Share-Alike licenses: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/use-remix/cc-licenses/#by-nc-sa
Which, just to be clear for OP, ist not Open Source anymore.
No.
At least I don’t think that’s how licenses work.
And there are no licenses that prevent selling open source code as far as I know. The only limit is that if the software is sold, they still have to provide a license and a copy of the source code. But I don’t think a license that would prevent people from extending whatever, for example with ads, would work.
And I should add, people use the popular licenses like MIT, GPL, because they’re proven and there have already been court cases ruling on obligations of people who took this or that piece of source code. You are free to write your own license, but if it holds up in court is then completely your problem.
Same as TOS, you can write anything you want into them, ultimately it’s a court that decides if it’s a valid thing or not. But only if there is a lawsuit.
As others have said, no, there is no such license, the things you want are incompatible with FOSS. Open Source and Free Software mean that everyone is free to modifiy the software according to their wishes. If you start prohibiting certain types of modifications, it’s clearly not Open Source anymore. Another core idea is that everyone is free to share the original (or modified) software. This can cost money, for example for blank CDs and postage back in the day, or for bandwidth today. Open Source can only prosper if the developers can recoup those costs, and that’s why the permission to charge money is so important.
However, Open Source is an insurance against anti-features. Why would anybody use the enshittified forks of your cloned app instead of your version?
Another question: Anybody can just break the license. To enforce it, you must be willing to go to court. Is that compatible with your wish to stay anonymous?