- Ones how respect licenses
- Ones who do not
90% of the time, if someone violates my license, and I send a polite email, it is followed from there on. 10% of the time -- as in the Harvard Medical School case -- there's a wilful violation.
For the 90% of parties who do follow licenses, they lay out a sort of constitution or a set of rules everyone in a commons plays by.
For the 10% who don't care, you can enforce them, but it will eat your life. Litigation sucks. Or you can ignore it. I generally do the latter. The most I do is name names in public forums, and only once it's abundantly clear that it's wilful, as I did with Harvard Medical School.
Well ... maybe there is a correlation?
I wouldn't enforce my license against a less affluent party either.
My experience is that I can spend my life fighting the good fight, or having fun. I'd rather have fun. Perhaps that's selfish of me -- Harvard will keep stealing -- but having taken both routes, dealing with crooks is a lot of stress and pain.
Building stuff and dealing with honest people is fun.
I'm excited about the Free Software Conservancy's copyright assignment. It feels like a V0, and I'm not ready to send my code over to them quite yet, but having someone else do the fighting on my behalf (and collect any gains too) would let me focus on having fun, while going after bad players: https://sfconservancy.org/assignment/
Come to think of it, it's an approach you might consider. Depending on your goals, they might be a good fit.
They do not. The do not care about them as well.
> Harvard Medical School is pirating software I wrote. > It's not worth a law suit against a $40B entity. > It doesn't matter what license I used. They stole it. > You can enforce SA, and get changes back. It's designed for exactly this purpose.
It can be enforced, yet you cannot enforce it. By your own logic, in real life licenses hardly matter at all.