There is a health app that is very important to sufferers of a specific disease and it is freemium and I find this detestable. I am doing a clean room rewrite of it in its entirety and plan to release it on fdroid. Is there a license that prevents some ghoul from forking it to profit from people’s misfortunes? I am trying to avoid legal issues by being clean room but will try to keep my publishing of the app as anonymous as possible regardless. Thanks
No.
At least I don’t think that’s how licenses work.
And there are no licenses that prevent selling open source code as far as I know. The only limit is that if the software is sold, they still have to provide a license and a copy of the source code. But I don’t think a license that would prevent people from extending whatever, for example with ads, would work.
And I should add, people use the popular licenses like MIT, GPL, because they’re proven and there have already been court cases ruling on obligations of people who took this or that piece of source code. You are free to write your own license, but if it holds up in court is then completely your problem.
Same as TOS, you can write anything you want into them, ultimately it’s a court that decides if it’s a valid thing or not. But only if there is a lawsuit.