I don’t get your point. Whether you use copyrighted material in commercial context or not always matters. That’s one of the most important aspects of different open source licenses.
This is not true for copyright law (the 4-factor test[0]) or for OSI licenses (they almost universally place no restrictions on commercial use). The only exception that comes to mind right now is the Creative Commons NC, which is generally recognized as being unsuitable for software[1].
And CC-NC isn't considered an open source license by the FSF or OSI anyway. And IMO the NC clause is pretty much impossible to define for non-trivial use and Creative Commons basically came up. Not sure non-derivatives is a lot better especially given remixing was one of the original drivers behind CC but it's at least less controversial.
Thanks you’re right. I was thinking about the license changes Elastic made to stop cloud providers from redistributing their products as a managed service.
No OSI-approved open source license prohibits the commercial use of software. In fact, the Open Source Definition expressly forbids discriminating on the basis of how the software will be used.
I can give you a rock that I own, which I hope we all agree is not copyrightable, and ask you to sign a license that you will keep it indoors. If you put it in your yard, you are breaking the license and potentially liable. This has nothing to do with copyright.
[0]: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ [1]: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...