Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On 2/6/07, Emerson Clarke <emerson.clarke AT gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Mark, perhaps im missing something but doesnt that mean that companies
are still free to use the software in circumstances where they are not
distributing it ?

Absolutely, yes.  Like I said, this doesn't completely stop commercial use, just makes it more difficult. It does stop people making a proprietary version of the software and this is the particular use case that most people using a dual license are concerned about.

As i mentioned before, i think that 90% of commercial software is
never made public.  And my understanding of existing open source
licenses like the GPL is that they only place restrictions on software
which is actually distributed to the public.

Yes. Due to the no discrimination against fields of endeavor restriction in the OSD it's not possible to prevent commercial use entirely.

Or does the dual license somehow revoke the existing commercial
conditions in the GPL ?

There are no restrictions on commercial use or distribution in the GPL (although it does make it much harder to make any money from commercial distribution).

    For instance, if i were a large government
consulting firm hired to develop a piece of software worth millions of
dollars for the government, there would be nothing to stop me from
using QT internally as the basis for this implementation.

In that particular case I'm not entirely sure if they'd be able to do that: when the commercial firm gives the software to the government that may well be distribution. A clear example would be something like software developed in house to control a production line where the software is never given to anyone else.