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