License question

[por at oranjevos.nl]

Op 22 mrt 2026, om 21:43 heeft Philip Prindeville via openwrt-devel <openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org> het volgende geschreven:
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> Van: Philip Prindeville <philipp_subx at redfish-solutions.com>
> Onderwerp: License question
> Datum: 22 maart 2026 om 21:43:28 CET
> Aan: openwrt-devel <openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org>
> Kopie: kmilo17pet at gmail.com
> 
> 
> What license does this correspond to ?
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> https://github.com/kmilo17pet/quectel-cm/blob/main/NOTICE
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Whatever the author may have intended, the wording of the NOTICE alongside the code certainly is self-contradictory. Public domain effectively comes down to: no restrictions on use at all, so confining that to a group of customers seems rubish. Presumably anyone within the exclusive group of customers would be allowed to use and alter the code and publish that under any licence of his or her choice.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain. 

Besides, restricting use rights to a restricted group of users is very hard to reconcile with OSS and definitely incompatible with FOSS.
For those reasons either do not use the code covered by this strange licence, or just treat it as public domain. IANAL and the consequences of disregarding the restriction may differ in different jurisdictions. Some research into court cases where open source use was restricted exclusively to a certain group may yield pointers to judge the risk of infringement suits.

Regards,
Paul

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