I had an idea for a website. After much coding and thinking out the idea, I\'ve

Question

I had an idea for a website. After much coding and thinking out the idea, I've got it to a decent stage.

If I were someone else, potentially a more commercially-minded person, I might want to sell it, or slather it with ads. However, I've fallen somewhat in love with open-source, and I'd like to host the project on GitHub and give it a nice open-source license.

However, the project seems to be getting better all the time and, in fact, I think that it'll quickly grow to be fairly popular. So I want to put ads on it that benefit charity.

How can I ensure that one small text advertisement benefiting charity remains in all derivative works? Are there any licenses that would let me do this?

p.s. My other requirement for a license is that it gives me attribution (in the same form as the MIT license would be fine)

Explanation / Answer

I like Patkos' answer, but I'd like to throw in a few other things.

First off, I would assume you could modify the GPL, or another similar license, as they require attribution and you simply add the stipulation that the original advertisements must remain.

However, by doing this you are somewhat defying the concept of open source software, as the source is no longer (completely) open.

There is nothing preventing someone else from starting an open source project to duplicate your webapp, as long as they don't use your code. And given the choice, which do you think people will pick?

Personally, I believe you either have to embrace open source or not. Straddling the line will only alienate the public.

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