I am starting a web API for my school and I was wondering what licence would be most appropriate?The goal is to have an open source application that can be freely shared with other school but prohibits it's use for commercial applications (basically to protect from companies who make software for schools).The application just manages tutoring assignments for tutors, students and the school administration. I did find this link: Free for academic use license, but since it was 3 years old I thought it might be a good idea to ask again.
Open Source license for school use, but not commercial use
license recommendation;software use
The open source definition does not allow discrimination against fields of endeavor, and you can't disallow commercial use if you want a license that meets the open source definition.An option is to go copyleft, which ensures that anyone who distributes software based on that software must follow the same license. It's possible (though tricky) to do that commercially, but your software and any published derivative works by others remain open source, and free for others to use as well.Well-known copyleft licenses are the GPL, AGPL, LGPL and MPL. Since you describe the project as web-based software, the AGPL might be suitable. This license requires people who let users interact with derivative software over the internet (for example through a web API) to publish their software under the AGPL as well.