This question is partially inspired by How is selling FLOSS packages for monetary compensation a viable strategy?After reading that question and some of its answers, I was left wondering if there are licenses which allow modification and redistribution of the project on the condition that one does not charge less money for the distribution than you paid yourself. This would circumvent the problems addressed in the above question.Are there any licenses that allow this and if so for what reasons would these licenses (not) be considered Open Source/Free?I strongly suspect that these licenses would not be considered Free or Open, but one never knows.
Can I forbid distributing my open source project for less money than I do?
licensing;distribution;commercial
Anybody can make pretty much any license they want so yes you could ask a lawyer to write a license like you're describing.But this would not fit the definition of an open source license. The whole point of open source is to let other people take your work and build on it, and that includes having a different pricing structure to your own.Sometimes they might take your entire project and take it in a totally different direction, other times they might just fix a couple bugs that you haven't fixed and make it available on GitHub, other times they might include your project as a child work in a larger project, or perhaps they might just grab 5 lines of code you wrote and include it in their own completely unrelated project.Any restrictions on pricing makes all of those situations nearly impossible. The only viable option under your license would be to take your project and sell it under a different name, but that's extremely rare. Why would anybody do that when it's so much easier to just contribute to the project you're running instead?