Re: Distinguishing "home" and "commercial" use
Re: Distinguishing "home" and "commercial" use
- Subject: Re: Distinguishing "home" and "commercial" use
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2015 10:13:39 -0400
I do something similar in the licensing of my Objective-C accessibility frameworks (at pfiddlesoft.com/frameworks). You can use my frameworks for free if you use them in an application that you distribute for free, but you must pay a one-time licensing fee if you charge for your application. The fee is modest if you are a "small developer," but it is reasonably substantial if you are a "big company" (but it is still small enough that a big company could not hire somebody for less to write the same code from scratch).
So far, I have relied strictly on the honor system to enforce the license, although I imagine the fact that I am a well-known trial lawyer with substantial experience in intellectual property law might influence some potential users. Apart from that, the fact that my products are frameworks gives me a little advantage because I can generally examine a publicly available application to see whether its developer used my frameworks.
I find that the most important and effective use of the honor system is with "big companies." Despite what you read in the news every day, I have found that big companies are generally not interested in risking copyright litigation by stealing code that they can license legally for a few thousand dollars. Honor aside, the risk and cost of litigation is simply too high to make that a good bet.
> On Jul 24, 2015, at 8:41 AM, 2551 <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> Aim: I want to distinguish “ordinary users” of my app from “commercial users”, where the latter might be defined as anyone installing my app on 5 or 10 (pick a number) different macs.
>
> Rationale: I want to offer my app for free to home users, but have those who use my app for commercial purposes (encouraged to) pay something. I know I can stipulate that in the licence, but since I’m a small, indie developer there’s no way I can enforce a licence in any case.
--
Bill Cheeseman - email@hidden
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