[blagie]

Your licensing is confused.

Companies do steal software. Universities steal software. Non-profits steal software. Individuals do too. Harvard Medical School is pirating software I wrote. I raised it with them through multiple channels, and they simply didn't respond to emails. It's not worth a law suit against a $40B entity. It doesn't matter what license I used. They stole it.

CC-NC-BY-SA guarantees the only entities using your software will be ones who don't mind breaking laws. "Non-commercial" is legally ill-defined, and virtually any use can appear as related to commerce in some way. It's a liability hole. If it's being used internally or on a server, you also can't enforce the SA provision.

AGPLv3 is the license you want. No commercial entity working on anything proprietary will realistically touch that with a 10-foot pole, unless they're willing to break laws (but non-commercial use is okay). You can enforce SA, and get changes back. It's designed for exactly this purpose.

The reasons you explained make no sense. Your logic is at the level of: "My computer was getting hot, so I got a new hard drive." "I thought my computer might have a virus, so I swapped out the RAM."

[snakers41]

> Companies do steal software.

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.

[blagie]

Licenses matter. There are two types of parties:

- 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.

[riedel]

What understand from German copyright law at least, it is equally important to actually have damages(at least that is what a FOSS specialized company lawyer explained to me based on some ordinary court cases). That means it might be easier if you have dual licence (and successfully sold it) and can prove that someone did not pay the regular licence fee, so you can be eligible to double the fee. I guess if the money at stake is big enough you find a lawyer. However I guess the case needs to be clear enough because the legal fees will go up as well for failure, I guess.

[snakers41]

What I hear is that the affluent "customer" does not respect licenses and you have no resources to enforce your license.

Well ... maybe there is a correlation?

[blagie]

Correlation between what? Between affluence and lack of respect for licenses? A weak one at best. My experience is that there are sleazeballs from all backgrounds, and good people too.

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.