Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Dana,

Thanks, i was actually looking at the microsoft licenses this morning.
But as you suggested, they do not go down well with the open source
community.

It seems that as a software developer you are forced to make the
choice between adoption or commercialisation.  The more open the
license, the wider the adoption, but at a diminishing commercial
return.

I wish there was a way i could just say it was free for open source
use but not free for commercial use.  But the more restrictive
licenses get in the way of that becuase they are incompatible.  It
would then mean that my code could never be used with a GPL project.

How do you avoid the situation where no one will use your library for
risk of their project becoming a clutter of licensing restrictions and
yet, as an individual, still make money from software ?



On 2/5/07, Dana Powers <dana.powers AT gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/5/07, Emerson Clarke <emerson.clarke AT gmail.com> wrote:
> > I was only quoting from some sources i read recently, see
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_and_GPL_licensing
>
> I think that article could use some major clarification and cleaning up:
>
> "The GPL requires the software to always be free..."
>  That's not true.  It requires that source code be distributed (or at least
> made available) with object code, and it permits further redistribution by
> users/distributees on the same terms.  There are no requirements one way or
> the other about (1) pricing or (2) types of use, although the distribution
> restrictions no doubt influence choices about both.  Whether you think these
> restrictions make the GPL licensing system more compatible with "freedom" is
> an entirely separate question.
>
> CC licenses don't address the object code / source code distinction, so they
> usually are not recommended for software licensing.  But the license that
> comes to mind for what you're looking for is one of Microsoft's Shared
> Source licenses, particularly the CLI:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source#Microsoft_Shared_Source_Common_Language_Infrastructure
>
> It goes without saying that licenses like these have been shunned by the
> free-software and open source communities because they are very skeptical of
> usage restrictions (neither seem particularly fond of CC-NC).
>
> Dana
>
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