Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Emerson Clarke" <emerson.clarke AT gmail.com>]

For the past 4 years i have been working on a number of innovative
internet technologies.  As part of this process i have produced a
large cross platform library of C++ code.

Whilst the core technology is too senstive, i would like to be able to
open source some or all of the library code.  Part of my motivation is
that i think there is a significant gap in currently available C++
libraries.

Libraries like STL, and Boost do little to address the majority of
tasks that a software developer performs.  They are either too
narrowly focused, or too abstract and esoteric.  There is no cross
platform library for C++ which has the ease of use and productivity of
the libraries found in other environments like Java, .NET or Python.

The library which i have written supports strings, times and dates,
threading, networking, xml, xpath, html, css, javascript, regular
expression, collections, machine learning, encryption, encoding, sql,
logging, filesystems, compression and many other features in an
extremely easy to use object heirarchy.

It is clearly written and easy to understand, and having been written
by a single person ,it is consistent and follows a strict principle of
least surprise.

As such i think it has both significant educational and commercial
value.  I would like to be able to provide it free to the open source
and academic communities, but i do not wish for people to be able to
gain commercially from my work.

As a software developer who has previously worked both as a contactor
and a consultant in industry sectors like investment banking and
retail it concerns me that large companies can readily use, and
indirectly or directly make staggering amounts of money from such use,
open source software without paying a cent for the work which has gone
into its development or contributing a single line of code back to the
community.

In most open source software the confounding factor is the attribution
of work.  When you have hundreds and potentially thousands of
individuals who have contributed to a project, it makes little sense
to seek financial reward from the commercial uses becuase the
distribution of such rewards would be impossible.

Hence most open source software simply rests on the "share and share
alike" principles which atleast encourage users not to exploit the
work without giving something back.  Of course, the only truly "open"
open source license are those which do not ask for anything back, but
thats another discussion.

Becuase i am the only developer of the software, attribution is not an
issue, and likewise i am more sensitive to the exploitation for
commercial gain.

I would like for there to be a way that i could share my work with the
open source community, the academic community, and indeed any
individuals who wished to use it for non commerical gain.  But where
by i was compensated for when it was used in any kindof commercial
setting, not just as part of a commercial software product.

I would like a licensing scheme which scales fairly, so that in a
commercial context the cost of the license was equal to the size of
the company.  Small companies pay less, big companies pay more.

How can an open source license meet these seemingly conflicting needs,
and how can i structure things so that the project can still grow and
have external contributors once it is out there in the community.

One way might be to set up a structure where by a certain percentage
of licensing fees was donated to an existing open source foundation or
one which represents the library itself. But such a scheme would be
tricky to manage, how do you work out how much goes to the community
and how much to the original developer.  It rapidly becomes an issue
of attribution again.

I have been thinking about this for many years, and sometimes i think
the only way to achieve my goal is to just give it away and not worry
about the commercial use.

But there must be an alternative...

Any ideas ?

Emerson