Why do you have your own license?

We based the Peaceful Open Source License (PeaceOSL) on the BSD 2-clause license, and added other clauses to ensure that our goals are met. There are thousands of open source licenses out there. So why did we create our own? There are a few reasons:

1. Some licenses are extremely short and permissive (BSD, MIT), and do not protect the project from being used as the basis for a closed-source product. We want to ensure that this project, and its derivatives, are always available in open source, so that even if our values change – heaven forbid! – the project will continue to benefit people.

2. Others are extremely long (GNU) and make our heads spin. We need a license that anyone can read and understand.

3. Still others do not allow mixing of open source components and closed-source components in a system. We need to build a hardware device and can't license ourselves into a corner!

4. Most importantly, only one other open-source license (the GPU project) (to our knowledge) includes a “Only Peaceful Use” clause. Since the technology that we are developing has potential dual-use purposes, we want to ensure that our efforts do not contribute to deliberately harming people.