Why did you not use a standard license (like the GPL, BSD, ... )?
None of the really standard licenses deal with a dual commercial/non-commercial project. So far, each project which wants to have an open-source version for non-commercial use and a separate commercial version has created their own license (the Aladdin Ghostscript license, the Bitkeeper project, QT, MySQL, etc ) because their needs are slightly different. We believe that software like Spread should be freely used for the good of the community, or should be paid for if it is used for commercial purposes. We are very flexible about this and our main goal is to have Spread used widely, so if you have a use in mind that doesn't qualify as non-commercial, educational or research, talk to us and we should be able to arrange something for you.
What do I need to do to use Spread in a commercial project?
You need to contact us to discuss a separate license. The recommended way is to email yairamir@spread.org or jonathan@spread.org or call us at 301-897-9680.
What is a commercial use as opposed to a non-commercial use?
This is not a legal definition, but a general idea of what we mean is a use is commercial if you or others who use the Spread configuration you set up receive monetary benefits by doing so. For example, if you use Spread to run a replicated Internet news service which is free to all users and does not directly provide income (such as advertising) then that is probably non-commercial, if you charge for it or if it is run by a business as part of their intranet or to improve their business's efficiency then it is commercial use. If you use Spread at home or for personal use not related to your normal job then that is usually non-commercial. Remember that the license also permits free use for educational or research purposes so most uses for teaching or research into how to do better replication or multicast would be permitted.
What notices are required by section (c)?
Basically if you build an application using Spread under this license you just have to give Spread credit whereever you generally put credit and copyright notices, such as in the documentation, in an "About xxx" screen, on a web site about it, and in the license. This also covers people who use Spread as a service on a web site. The web service should give attribution that you are using Spread. This is simply to protect ourselves so anyone who receives Spread as part of some larger application built by someone else will be sure to be told that Spread is part of that system and what rights they have to use Spread.