Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Mark Brown" <broonie AT gmail.com>]

On 2/5/07, Emerson Clarke <emerson.clarke AT gmail.com> wrote:

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.

The usual approach in that situation is to do as Rob suggested and dual license the software under both the GPL and a proprietary license. QT is one prominent example of this approach.

This allows at least GPL compatible free software applications to use the work but does limit what can be done commercially, especially where the work is a library like yours. Anyone who wanted to develop a proprietary application using the library would have to obtain a commercial license before distributing their application. It doesn't completely eliminate commercial exploitation (people can still do things like sell Linux distributions including the software) but anything that did would have trouble getting accepted by the community.