i am glad to say that we are going to make Advanced Electron Forum (anelectron.c

Question

i am glad to say that we are going to make Advanced Electron Forum (anelectron.com) an Opensource project, since we have a lack in developers and we think that this will make the development wheel turn much much better, we are going to post the source code to public in github, but we are not sure about the license that we are going to use, GPL gives too much freedom we don't want,

the only thing we want to prevent the user from doing is the forking, we don't want any forks or redistribution of the code without permission, so what to chose ?

Explanation / Answer

The Open Source Definition states that an open source license must allow the software to be freely redistributed and to allow derivative works to be made. If that is not what you want, you should write your own license. However, that license would not be considered open source, and hence your software could not be rightfully considered open source software.

One thing you can do however is require any forks to carry different names or version numbers, according to paragraph 4 of the open source definition

4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code

The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if
the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the
purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit
distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require
derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.

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