Why the Keypunch Public License

By: The Depressed Milkman

Date: 2021-06-29

Tags: #licensing #kpl

For a few months now, I've been exclusively using the Keypunch Public License, which is not 'free' or 'open-source', for all my new projects. I made the switch to KPL from AGPL-3.0 after looking into the Anti-Capitalist Software License, and asking on (~verse) IRC about suggestions on improving it. ~dgold kindly pointed me towards a license they had made which exactly fit my usecase, and that was when and how I fell in love with KPL.

The Keypunch Public License website

The core reason why I use KPL is to prevent others from making money from my work without compensating me. A 'free' and 'open-source' license (by the definitions of the FSF/OSI/etc.) such as GPL doesn't allow authors to deny others from using their software for any purpose whatsoever. Anybody is thus free to use any (A)(L)GPL-licensed project out there (and there are many) to make money, and they do not need to compensate the authors of the work at all. I'm not comfortable with that fact.

If one wishes to use KPL-licensed software for commercial/monetary purposes, they can contact the author and request a special license under which they can use it. This allows the author to control how and when their software is used to make money. For example, I could allow companies to use my software for making money as long as they compensated me adequately for it. KPL thus doesn't prevent a software from being commercially at all, and instead hands over control of such commercial/monetary uses to the authors.

For more information about KPL (including the license text, which is very human-readable), see the KPL website, linked above.

-- (C) CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 2021-06-29 The Depressed Milkman