Good licenses for in-house projects [closed]

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I would like to find out if there is any type of license with the following requirements:

• The author decides with whom to share the code (this would be optional)
• You are free the copy any part of the code
• If you modify the program, you must give it back
• The author controls distribution

... or any combination of the above. Many companies build interesting in-house software projects. One problem with these tools is that they are built with the budget of one department, therefore not many managers will like to spend their budget building a completely free (GPL/BSD) tool. If they sacrifice their own budget, they might have some second thoughts before sharing the code with other departments that were not involved in the costs.

I think there must be out there some licenses that promote good relations between departments. Something of the spirit of "we give you our code, but if you improve it, you must give it back to us/everyone". At the same time the license should provide some control on distribution in order to keep the code free within a company.

LGPL could be a great example, the only problem is tha开发者_运维问答t the author has no control on distribution. I know that if the teams keep the binaries inside the company the code will never go public, but many managers would rather prefer some real control on the distribution as a mean to protect their effort.

I am looking for a license that promotes sharing within a company departments but only one person/department should have the decision if it can be shared for free with the outside world.

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You are taking the wrong approach. Licenses are useful when transferring copyrighted works between legal entities, but departments within a company are all part of the same legal entity. The R&D department can't sue the sales department for releasing something without permission.

The appropriate way to handle this is through management/policy.

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You could try GNU Affero GPL.

As always if license is not enough for you You could modify its content rename it as myAffero and redistribute your software with it.