yes there was considerable enthusiasm, youths turning into assembler wizards,
and colorful intros. If you really look nowadays this Amiga stuff, there was just a bit
too much pride, if you ask me.
No one really cared about a license!
If you ask me all these fancy licenses don't introduce more freedom, there is rarely the case where you'd advance from such a license, without to hire lawyers forehand.
It is a bit an excursion into the paranoid 1970s, where indeed they did not yet intend ordinary consumers to have computers. And these days, you see this attitude resurrected, you buy a phone, you buy a phone 2 times a year, and after some while, you have weird files that you can't delete, some weird phreakers whizzed them into your phone, but you are jailed, "you" are a stupid "user" with no rights even to see the file system.
We should really hail Bill Gates for his MSDOS, it is designed from the roots to give user access to the file system, while all this mobile stuff, they lock out the users, and there are tons of rather useless "apps", and games at the brink of unplayability.
I stopped playing World of Warcraft, they always ask to agree again and again for the 3 licenses loathing over many pages, i agreed 50 times or so altogether, no way of reading all this insanity.
My point is, a license should be crisp and clear, like what I wrote, pointing it out that the intellectual property is actively owned by someone.
I mean, if you write "no ownership is transfered", it does not exclude you can use it for personal purpose. But it does cover for instance the case, a business shark gathering the work of other people, build a product with it, without involving much own efforts, then declaring it as a work of his own, and making money with it.
It is a subtle hint that if you want to use it commercially, you have to get in touch, and reach an agreement, but also in the case of cease and desist for 2 decades already, you'd really not have to bother anymore at all.
Most open source I ever saw is a joke, because the programming style is not always the best, without some PDFs explaining the program logic, without configuration information, without flow chart, all the source codes are pretty much worthless. Yes you can become hacker and hexmonitor what they are doing, you can recompile the kernel but why would you want to.
The only thing is, additional information how the source codes actually work, is sometimes made available commercially.
For a megabytes-large source, there is a lot additional documentation required, if it is absent, you can at best hack it, but it would be better rewriting it yourself.
Think for instance Visual Studio, without the MSDN documentation. Would it be of any use, maybe trying to understand it only by means of some supplied example sources?
Sometimes I can not get rid of the idea these licenses come from the 1990s generation, they had the rave parties, and big enthusiam/idealism exists, but the truth is the situations spelled in these licenses are out-of this world, artificial realities, and the hackers/phreakers/stealers will do so anyway.
My idea is, all this license nonsense should stop alltogether, and there should be some good, powerful and adequate software laws, covering all sort of softwares worldwide. But if you look bodies like the RIAA, the weird things SONY tried to sell to people together with MINI DISC (so called "checkout" system), and all these countless weird copy protection schemes, I don't think we get any such laws soon.
Altogether, having 100s if not 1000s of different software license agreements, is nothing but anarchy! You can't really say that you did read all of the licenses, and that you remember them literally all day. So why not some software laws that are real-world, fair play, and get rid of indidivdual licenses.
Is this what these creative commons guys had in mind? But please, one license only. Not 5 or 6 or 7 with 50 exceptions.
I think the only real law is cash flow! If there was intellectual work, and someone is enjoying the product, then there is cash flow required, unless the author has voluntary intentions or is doing it as a hobby.
But all these school maths are useless anyway, you learn to memorize complicated formula, but then you can't even realize the fact we drive 4 seats cars, most of the time, only one person driving. What a waste, and very simple maths.