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by languagewars 3553 days ago
These are all reasons not to republish -NC- material, they are no more convincing reasons not to use it to license as the arguments against GPL3.

Maybe you have less uptake from people in the grey areas and less spread through for profit use. Looking at OSS today, maybe that is what you want.
2 comments
ghaff 3553 days ago
Disagree. There are philosophical and practical reasons to argue against copyleft licenses in favor of more permissive licenses. [ADDED: or vice versa.] But there's not a lot of debate about what copyleft means (outside of some corner cases relating to linking and interfaces).

The issue with NC isn't so much around the fact that it prohibits commercial use--though in the views of some that makes it a non-free license and therefore something to avoid for that reason alone--but that defining what constitutes commercial use in the general case is essentially impossible and very much in the eyes of the beholder.

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languagewars 3553 days ago
GPL2's single work issue may be a better example of ambiguosness, but dual licensing w/GPL3 is complex enough to collect from commercial licensees. Enterprises often buy the paid license because it is too hard for them to evaluate whether they will manage compliance over time.

Such a method seems quite typical to protect ones work while sharing it with end users and seems to be what the OP expected from using CC.

I don't like the state of NC, but the point of copyleft is harvesting the irony that licensors get to state the terms and aren't particularly penalized for much of anything they do wrong (their unenforceable clauses are simply ignored). So why not take NC if you want CC with a commercial chilling effect? You don't have to sue anyone, yet that chill is still there. A resolution in one US court wont even change that chill much.

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wolfgke 3553 days ago
> they are no more convincing reasons not to use it to license as the arguments against GPL3.

The GPLv3 defines rather exactly what is allowed and what is not. That's what a license is for: defining exactly what is allowed and what isn't (which does not contradict that there are purposes for which the GPLv3 is suitable and ones for which it is not). NC for Non-Commercial in Creative Commons on the other hand is some wishy-washy term that does not clearly define where the boundary between commercial and non-commercial is.

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