Many of us are illiterated in use of these licenses. Even a contributor like Zed. I could imagine a generally available rule of thumb on licensing for open source: something like dual licensing. My code is free for all peer hackers but not for big corporations.
Is that something available? Ie. a variation/combination of CC or GPL or BSD or MIT?
Where do you draw the line?
That's the reason I think that GPL/dual licensing is the best. If it is a casual hacker, he shouldn't mind reciprocating. If it is a company, it shouldn't mind paying.
Just one question: Is dual licensing a common pattern or many other licenses are used frequently (BSD, CC)? Just wondering if there is such a protective and still free, clear licensing why people are not using it as a de facto standard?
They want as many corporations as possible to build on Eclipse to take the wind out of VS's sails. They are not interested in making money from Eclipse. They are interested in limiting the influence of Microsoft on their enterprise customers. So the license is a strategic tool.
Linux is kind of an accident in that regard. Linus chose a license long before the big corporations found that they had to support Linux after they had successfully crushed each others' Unix business in a decade long war of attrition.
So Linux is GPL, but fortunately they found a way to interpret GPL in a way that didn't preclude closed source software on top of it. It's all in their definition of "linking".
Where this ingenious trick doesn't work, in the device drivers space, the whole thing breaks down, which every Linux on Laptop user has been able to experience for many many years. A single non-cooperative device manufacturer can prevent sleep and resume, power management and many other functions to not work properly for many users. So Linux has become almost exclusively a server platform, contrary to Linus Torvalds personal desires, but in agreement with the BigCorp strategy.
How much you have to tell anybody about using a particular piece of software and whether you can use it for commercial purposes, that's all in the licenses. I don't understand the fuss and I don't understand what not exploiting OSS would look like or what not employing Zed Shaw has to do with plagiarism. I just don't get it.
I do understand Zed's anger because he has put in a lot of quality work for very little in return. That's because he gave his work away with no obligation for anyone to even mention him. And he has given his work away to people who don't seem to care much about quality of implementation. I think he should consider writing closed source software, shocking as it may be. I don't think there are any moral or ethical conclusions for OSS whatsoever and all the talk about plagiarism and venture capital is nonsensical in my opinion.
OSS is a good tool for learning, for passing on knowledge, for getting into a market and for big corporation's to ruin the competitions income stream. At the end of the day you need to sell your open source software or yourself to BigCorp. That's the only way to monetize it and everybody should be aware of this simple fact by now.