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devlux [soylentnews.org] writes:

Hello fellow soylentils.

I have a project that I have put an enormous amount of effort into and would like to release it as a browser plugin because I feel that it might be useful. However today I heard about a somewhat similar product that ended up abusing user trust in order to steal funds.

Browser plugins are sort of a bad joke when it comes to code security. In truth they are nothing more than a zip file and anyone can download the plugin and read the source directly assuming too much obfuscation was not used. That said, there is no real "peer review". You're limited to either your own ability to read the code, or in the case of web store distributed plugins, then perhaps a cursory glance by whomever is in control of the webstore.

This product is intended to be something that people can entrust small amounts of funds and do tipping and other micropayment type of transactions. Really just a handy thing to have. Imagine a portable tipbot and you're on the right track.

I'm moderately confident in my skills as a programmer after two decades of doing this for a living and I'm completely comfortable with leaving the code out in the open for review. However it is not based on any open source product and I'd rather not see derivatives out in the open because a lot of what goes on under the hood was a significant effort to get right. I have seen many similar projects try but fail. In this particular case, the revenue model expects that the author (me) gets a small fee for each transaction. Unfortunately, this means that someone could easily just grab the code, change a few lines of code and release a competing product.

What I'm looking for is a license that allows me to leave the source code out in the open, but prevents reuse, repackaging or redistribution, either for commercial or non commercial purposes.

In short I think this qualifies more as "source available" than real "open source".

I realize that this tone might be anathema, but this project was a significant time sink during a time when money has been exceptionally tight and I would like to see some compensation for my efforts. This is not a "thin fork" of anyone else's work and although there are some products out there that are superficially similar, nothing really does everything this does.

To date I've only ever released products as GPL or BSD or of course closed source commercial so I don't have a lot of experience with licensing. I realize that once I release the code into the wild like that, enforcement will become a major problem. But I would like to at least maintain my rights as an author and perhaps give someone who might casually swipe my code, some pause for consideration. Additionally if the code was posted for public inspection somewhere, if someone did rip the code wholesale, there is at least some chance I can point to github and say "see! this code is not belong to you!" :)

Any suggestions and ideas are welcome. Thanks!

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