Which DUAL Licence should I choose.

[Greg Grossmeier]

On 08/01/2011 01:45 PM, Tzeng, Nigel H. wrote:
> My personal belief is that they are simply being nice to not step on toes
> (and avoid a huge non-constructive pissing contest) as opposed to there
> being some significant issue in using CC licenses for software. 

Well, there are some really important distinctions between source code
licenses and CC licenses meant for other media: CC licenses make no
distinction between source or compiled versions of anything.

So, technically, as long as I distribute the compiled form a program
written in C, I'm complying with the terms of the CC license. That,
effectively, isn't useful at all.

That very example is given in the FAQ I linked.

> If you can point at an OSI approved equivalent for CC-BY-NC-SA please do
> so.  Oh wait, by definition you cannot.  He wants to collect license fees
> from commercial users, allow free use by private users and provide
> royalties to contributors so no FOSS license is meaningfully applicable.

Right, I'm only saying that a CC license might not even be exactly what
he wants. Because I could take the code, make modifications, obfuscate
it, compile it, distribute that obfuscated/compiled version, and never
share my source modifications, and not be in violation of the license. I
don't think he wants to have that happen.

Thus, while yes, part of the reason *may* be not to step on anyone's
toes, there are *very* important legal differences between the licenses
that make a huge difference when applied to source code.

> What are the alternatives?  There are a few academic non-commercial
> licenses out there but none all that widely accepted, well-known and
> probably most need adaptation since they are tied to a specific entity.

The alternatives, as far as I know, are to hire a lawyer to write you a
custom license. There won't be any OSI approved NonCommercial license,
as you rightly pointed out. There obviously won't be any FSF approved
similar license either.

It is a common request from some part of the quasi-open source community
(I only put "quasi" there because by definition their desired
restrictions don't fit any "open source" definition recognized by any
respected group). So, if someone wants to hire a group of lawyers to
create such a license, there is nothing stopping them. I just don't
think it will gain much popularity.

IANAL as well :)

Greg

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|       Greg Grossmeier |
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