I do extensive personal work in the modding/romhacking space of games. This space is about taking existing commercial games and adding custom content or features to them, generally through unofficial means. These changes are then released as patches, so as not to violate the copyright or DRM of the original game. I write specs based on my research, utilities, and some hacks myself. The last couple of years, when I release utilities (which these days I write in Python - a non-compiled language) or specs I use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, as attribution and share-alike are my two copyright concerns.
However, I'm now looking to publish some closed-source hacks as patches. They are utility hacks that are useful to other hackers making their hacks, e.g. one of mine optimizes one part of the game's code, increasing performance and reducing slowdown by several percent. I'm wondering how copyright even works in this case. As intended, the license allows them to creative derivative hacks, so I could certainly see attribution being a reasonable and enforceable requirement. But does the concept of share-alike even apply in a context where I'm releasing binary code and anyone who derived from my hack would necessarily have to release their binary code as well, as there's no point in making a hack you never publish? If not then I guess the question is moot and I should just drop the share-alike clause entirely. But if it does apply, how does it apply to this circumstance?
I do like the idea of requiring improvements to my code (e.g. Person X makes Improved Improved Performance Hack that adds further optimizations on top of mine) to be made available as well, but I am not aware of any way in which the law differentiates between utility hacks like that and complete hacks, e.g. where my optimizations are used in a much bigger hack that has custom levels, etc. In such a case I certainly don't want to force limitations on their entire hack by forcing a specific license just because they incorporate my improvements.