[ghaff]

Non-commercial licenses are IMO seriously wrongheaded. It's hardly a unique problem here. See also Creative Commons which spent something like a decade trying to define what the term meant and then ended up pretty much punting when it came time for 4.0.

Even leaving aside philosophical free software issues, the practicalities are considerable. A term (as in this license) such as "not aimed at direct or indirect financial gain" could be read as ruling out pretty much any non-trivial public use given how many things are indirectly monetized in various ways today.

[msla]

The main practicality is how many of the commercial users are just going to ignore the niceties of the license and use it regardless.

Getting people to understand that "No Copyright Intended" [0] doesn't absolve them of copyright infringement is tough enough. You'll never get some nontrivial number of people to understand that free download doesn't mean free for every potential conceivable purpose ever in perpetuity.

[0] https://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/

[sp332]

Doesn't this just mean you have to contact the author to work out terms for a commercial license?

[ghaff]

"Just" that. But the reality is that if I'm looking for a commercially licensed photograph, font, or whatever, there are already plenty of sites that I can go to and pay for. And, if I'm looking for something free in a situation that clearly doesn't fall under non-commercial (e.g. marketing materials), I'm just going to skip over anything with a "non-commercial" only license and pick something else.

[w0m]

'Just' - but many need to do that through a legal department, so that requirement would be a dead stop unless there was an extreme advantage gained vs alternatives.