Hey Fons!
I agree with the fact that your code took lots of time, effort and knowledge
to write. I would however question the obligation of other people to pay you
unless before making your work available to them you have made a contract
with them, in which case this is just work for hire.
If, I argue, you have made your work public, then nobody made a contract with
you. Simply speaking, nobody asked you to do the work you did. But once it is
available publicly, I do not see on what grounds you can demand payment.
Notice the words "obligation" and "demands" there. I am not at all saying one
should not be grateful and/or not be able to pay you willingly.
So my message is that if the work is made public, then nobody should be obliged
to pay for using that work.
What copyright law does is create a default contract between anyone doing the work
and the whole public. That contract is enforced on the public. They did not ask for it,
nor do they have a chance to negotiate it.
And in this light GPL and CC licenses are really a license on top of a license -
basically, things which take the default public contract which is the copyright law
and scratch out several lines out of it.
This is why I cal GPL and CC a lesser evil. It is a good thing, because it is a battle
for freedom, but it is evil because it "accepts" the framework of the enforced contract,
which is the copyright law. It does not accept it willingly, so GPL and CC are doing good
things in this world, but I do not believe that GPL and CC are an ideal towards which we
should go. I believe that the better situation would be the absence of copyright law.
--
Louigi Verona
http://www.louigiverona.ru/