Licensing Tricks

Projects that claim to be "open source" (I would say free software, though) but are "source-available", i.e. non-free (linked are last commits where I found such licensing tricks applied):

  1. mirai, a protocol library and chat bot framework for QQ.
    Licensed under AGPL with additional terms saying "no commercial use".

  2. QNotified, tweaks for the Android QQ client.
    Licensed under AGPL with additional EULA saying "no commercial use".

  3. PCL, a third-party Minecraft launcher.
    Not corresponding source code: only part of it is released; not giving 4 essential freedoms: "study but do not modify".

  4. Pikapika, a third-party client for PicACG.
    Licensed under the MIT (Expat) License with additional terms in README saying "no commercial use" and "don't share it however you wish".

  5. SmsForwarder, an Android app forwarding imcoming SMSes elsewhere.
    Licensed under the 2-Clause BSD License with additional terms in README saying "no commercial use".

It is appreciated that terms to prohibit non-free software hosting have been introduced by some code hosting services including Codeberg and NotABug, excluding GitHub.


To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.