Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Michael Tiemann <tiemann AT redhat.com>]

On Mon, 2007-02-05 at 20:15 +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
> 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. 

I agree--the dual-license hack is the best approach I've seen to get the
best of both worlds.

M