Actually, I really agree with you here. In fact, it got me thinking about sort of a protection clause in licenses along these lines. Where you can say, "This software is BSD licensed, providing you follow the guidelines in the PACKAGING file."

Then, any OS distribution would be required to follow your wishes or not include your software. If you want unit tests, they include them. If you want all of it, or parts of it, they do it. If they don't want to or can't then they don't adopt your project.

I'm currently just figuring out how to word the license that way so it'd still work.

That license would not be "BSD", and what it was likely wouldn't be blessed by FSF/OSI/etc. (it doesn't meet the Open Source Definition, http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd and it’s probably not GPL-compatible), instantly making it suspect to lots of people.... Crockford got flak for adding a “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil” clause, after all.[1] That would make it impossible for your code to be used by many open source projects.

[1] The FSF says “This is a restriction on usage and thus conflicts with freedom 0. The restriction might be unenforcible, but we cannot presume that. Thus, the license is nonfree.”

Sounds like you want a license where you get to dictate exactly how any downstream user reuses your software, down to the details of the packaging, and prohibit modifications/forks/removals/etc.? But that's not really an open-source license at all, then.

The whole point of open-source software is that I can take a thing, decide that I only want 50% of it, rip out the other 50%, add on a bunch of new stuff, totally change some of the remaining stuff, use it for a new purpose, package it in a new way, undo a decision the maintainer made that I disagree with, etc. If you don't like people having that freedom, open-source just doesn't seem like the way to go. It sounds like you want a "freeware for verbatim distribution" proprietary-but-no-cost license.

> dictate exactly how any downstream user reuses your software

I agree with your post. It's also worth pointing out that if someone abandons open source licensing, one thing I'd put in my licenses - way before we talk about fiddling with the path layout and such - is that the software can't be used by people I find reprehensible: neonazis, repressive governments, and so on and so forth.

Of course, I prefer freedom to that kind of licensing, so I just live with the knowledge that horrible people may use things I wrote.

The people you harm by restricting neo-nazis from using your software aren't neo-nazis, but everyone else who has to pay for lawyer time to review your custom license before they can use it. Or what's more likely: aren't going to use it at all once they see what sort of license you have.

Not to mention that actual neonazis will probably not give a great deal of thought to violating said license, meaning you'd have to have a way to monitor usage, and then go to court to stop them. All in all, a hassle that's not worth it.

Actually it is OK to use a license that says that if you change X, Y, and Z then you can't name it Foo and can't say it is written by Bar.

I think that such a license would fit Zed's needs perfectly. Particularly if his restrictions were mild enough that nobody minded following them.

Firefox would be an obvious example of that. All that happens is that Debian will rename the package and ship it anyway, and users lose even more than they did before. Good job! ;)