A different kind of charityware

Charityware is a kind of shareware, where the developer asks the customer to donate something to charity. The VIM text editor is a good example of this.

That is lovely for private developers wanting to use their hobby for good and merit, but there is another kind of charityware, (anyone know the name for this?), that individual and corporate commercial application developers can consider.

Why not license your application free to charities? With electronic distribution it is almost no expense, it increases your user base and goodwill at the initial stages of product release, it probably does not lose full-price customers, it makes you and your team happy, and, more than anything else, it is good for the world.

My company has been doing this for a while now, and I recommend it. We use an adjusted version of our evaluation license, forbidding re-distribution or commercial use and not promising support. We also keep track of license keys, so we know the source of pirated versions. People email us with details, we vet them quickly, with a polite "sorry" if they not really charities (not all not-for-profit organizations are charities!). We have been picked up by charities in five continents.

In my experience, the key thing is making sure the charitable licenses are almost zero cost to administer: we take about five minutes per license and we get a handful of requests per month. Its not a big deal for us, but you never know, it could be pivotal for some charitable project.

I guess this mostly applies to shrink-wrapped, end-user applications. I suspect a different kind of license would be most useful for commercial libraries: one that says that the library can be supplied free of charge for use in products supplied free of charge to registered charities for their exclusive, non-commercial use but not re-distribution.

Is there a name for this kind of license?