We already had our issues with local corporations neglecting the license (and being in general disrespectful towards the community), so we had to change it to CC BY-NC-SA to avoid this in future.
If you can't enforce your license how is choosing a different license helping you?
After a quick glance I thought I might use this for a project of mine but NC-SA definitely killed my interest in this. I'm not a local corporation trying to get rich, but "NonCommercial" is an absolute minefield, left vague on purpose[1].
I've seen this sort of licensing on free game assets like Warsow and I think they work there (after all, the main use is to scare people away from re-using them at all) and I really wonder why something like AGPL wouldn't work better in this case.
What does CC BY-NC-SA actually mean when applied to the model? Are the .wav files generated by it considered CC BY-NC-SA as well or only software derived from it? Would I be allowed to use the output in say a Youtube video?
Would you be open to AGPLv3? This mandates allowing the user to replace the code with their own, and requires publishing source code to users even if it's "hidden in the cloud". (well IANAL, so don't take my understanding as a fact)
Companies do steal software. Universities steal software. Non-profits steal software. Individuals do too. Harvard Medical School is pirating software I wrote. I raised it with them through multiple channels, and they simply didn't respond to emails. It's not worth a law suit against a $40B entity. It doesn't matter what license I used. They stole it.
CC-NC-BY-SA guarantees the only entities using your software will be ones who don't mind breaking laws. "Non-commercial" is legally ill-defined, and virtually any use can appear as related to commerce in some way. It's a liability hole. If it's being used internally or on a server, you also can't enforce the SA provision.
AGPLv3 is the license you want. No commercial entity working on anything proprietary will realistically touch that with a 10-foot pole, unless they're willing to break laws (but non-commercial use is okay). You can enforce SA, and get changes back. It's designed for exactly this purpose.
The reasons you explained make no sense. Your logic is at the level of: "My computer was getting hot, so I got a new hard drive." "I thought my computer might have a virus, so I swapped out the RAM."
> Harvard Medical School is pirating software I wrote.
> It's not worth a law suit against a $40B entity.
> It doesn't matter what license I used. They stole it.
> You can enforce SA, and get changes back. It's designed for exactly this purpose.
It can be enforced, yet you cannot enforce it.
By your own logic, in real life licenses hardly matter at all.
90% of the time, if someone violates my license, and I send a polite email, it is followed from there on. 10% of the time -- as in the Harvard Medical School case -- there's a wilful violation.
For the 90% of parties who do follow licenses, they lay out a sort of constitution or a set of rules everyone in a commons plays by.
For the 10% who don't care, you can enforce them, but it will eat your life. Litigation sucks. Or you can ignore it. I generally do the latter. The most I do is name names in public forums, and only once it's abundantly clear that it's wilful, as I did with Harvard Medical School.
What understand from German copyright law at least, it is equally important to actually have damages(at least that is what a FOSS specialized company lawyer explained to me based on some ordinary court cases). That means it might be easier if you have dual licence (and successfully sold it) and can prove that someone did not pay the regular licence fee, so you can be eligible to double the fee. I guess if the money at stake is big enough you find a lawyer. However I guess the case needs to be clear enough because the legal fees will go up as well for failure, I guess.
After a quick glance I thought I might use this for a project of mine but NC-SA definitely killed my interest in this. I'm not a local corporation trying to get rich, but "NonCommercial" is an absolute minefield, left vague on purpose[1].
I've seen this sort of licensing on free game assets like Warsow and I think they work there (after all, the main use is to scare people away from re-using them at all) and I really wonder why something like AGPL wouldn't work better in this case.
1. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpre...