Here's my problem:
Say you do a custom web application for a company and when you sign the
contracts, that company, as part of their contract, says that all entities of
the site belong to them. Its like any other job where you work for someone
and they own the work you produce and you cannot reuse it for someone else.
That includes the layout, images, and code. If you choose to reuse that code,
you are then violating the terms of the contract and sharing potentally
copyrighted work and can be taken to court for it.
The point of licencing is that I own the code and the client uses something
of mine that I can reuse for others and simply change around things to make
it custom to them. The main code is pretty much done and maintained by me and
with them using it from me as a service, they cannot claim that it is their
code in a court. They would get the same funcionality as if they had me make
it from scratch and custom for them but the benefit is that I have some
protection as a developer.
