Hi all,

I made up a custom license for my projects. I already put it on some of them, but what do you actually think of it?
Are there things I could improve?

I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but you may wish to consider the following:

What counts as "commercial purposes?" I assume you meant "notified" instead of "noticed" - is there a time requirement for this notification, or any particular means of notification required? I'm not sure what type of programs this license is being applied to, but if someone is using the program itself, rather than its source code, as a productivity tool or something, do they still have to notify you? If so, that might lead to an unnecessary amount of spam. Does distributing the software count as "using" it?
If I can't imply that you agree with the use of the software, can I explicitly state it?

I know these probably sound like stupid questions with obvious answers, but it's important to be precise when writing legal documents, as when there's a dispute it comes down to what is said, not what was actually meant.
A rather humorous example of this which I found earlier today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#%22Good,_not_Evil%22.

I am also not a lawyer and this is also not legal advice.

There are a lot of licenses that are almost what you want- one example is cc-by-nc-sa, though that prohibits commercial use instead of just making them notify you (which is kind of a weird clause anyway, if a company is working on a secret project or something they might not be able to notify you and must pick some other code? Also what even counts as notifying you?)

Here's a good reason to choose an existing license: when I see that some code is licensed under apache/gpl/mit/creative commons/etc, I know exactly what I can and cannot do without even checking the license. I'm not a lawyer- I don't trust myself to be able to interpret the wording of every license correctly every time, especially if it has some vague or unclear phrases.

I hate to discourage someone from doing something they're interested in doing, but I would strongly recommend using choosealicense or something, even if it isn't exactly what you want. You can just ask nicely in your readme's for people using this commercially to contact you if they can

Hmmm...
Yeah, the thing is just that I want to know when someone uses my project for commercial purposes. And there is no license that does that.
But mostly I don't care much about what people do with my projects, as long as they just give me the appropriate credit.
Though for commercial use... I just want to know it when someone uses my project to get money.

Why do you care?

I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but you may wish to consider the following:
Don't take this as being mean, but in nearly every case it's better to choose an existing license. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_proliferation.

However, in a specialized thing, like this, it could be okay. In this case, however, it looks GPL incompatible. If it isn't, it's useless.

Explanation:
If this license requires derivative projects to keep it, it is GPL incompatible.
If it doesn't, one can make a derivative project under the GPL instead of this license, and make a commercial derivative, something that's explicitly allowed under the GPL. (And then, I think they'd not have to tell you.)

I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, so take ^^^^^ with a grain of salt.

I am too lazy to actually make my own post so instead I quote people and then don't say anything new

I would like to point out that you did say something new (something Mateo didn't say)

Not to be the debbie downer here, but what is the point of this? In what way will some entity using your software affect you? Clauses like this only serve benefit, IMO, if you're selling your software. If you're releasing it as freeware, who cares who else uses it and for what?


Many of the open source licenses imply this.

I'm no lawyer, but imo it's generally bad practice to go applying arbitrary license clauses to software when those clauses really don't matter for the particular use case, like the "commercial purposes" bit.
People don't like licenses that are more controlling than they have to be. Not to mention, we're a community of freeware devs (mostly). Anyone who is going to use your software is likely going to use it non-commercially, and relicense it GPL. So just use GPL to start.

^ Not a lawyer, again, but this is my personal opinion.

There are already dozens of OSI-approved software licenses... are you sure none of the existing ones fits your purposes ?

Restrictions on commercial usage yield instant incompatibility with multiple important licenses, so you can't mix with potentially interesting external components at will.

LGPL is always a nice middle ground to consider.

Hmm. Ok.
You all convinced me to not use my own made-up license.
But I don't like the GPL, it is so long...
I will for now then just use the BSD 3-clause. I actually based my own on the BSD and MIT.