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Comment by e12e | Hacker News Reader

The project looks interesting, but the licensing change from MIT is a bit worrying:

"Oni 2 is licensed under the CC-BY-NC-4.0 license."

CC licenses are not a good fit for software in general - and "non commercial" isn't very clear. Making something available at zero cost doesn't necessarily make it "non commercial".

Ed: and it means that code snippets/widgets from oni2 can't be used elsewhere without careful licensing - which is one reason cc/NC is a poor fit even for code examples - it's for education, but you cannot use what you learn...

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Oni 2 creator here. Agree with your concern 100%. We're working to review the license and come up with a better fit with more clarity.

We really just want a license that says - free to use for educational / non-commercial purposes, but a license is required to use in a commercial environment. No real "drop-in" licenses to support this, unfortunately. Some additional thoughts about our considerations here: https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/ae7ef6/question_abo...

The work that we want to share out (custom widgets that are more generally applicable) will live in Revery - that's the reason we split Revery out from Oni2 into an MIT Licensed project - so that we could share the heart of the work out with a broader community, and get help building out this foundation, too.

Hm. The problem here is that this sounds like it won't be open/libre/Free, and is likely to have issues with collaboration (on the code).

It sounds like a dual license with AGPL might be what you want?

Just an example, if I work for a year on a free/gratis project using and modifying oni2 - I'll have a disadvantage working in a commercial setting on similar projects - I can't use my own snippets, mixed with oni2 code in my commercial (even if open/free) project...

I think the "shareware" model might work (and eg: giving free licenses for education, non profits etc). But I'm not sure how the "user freedoms" for code can work at the same time as there are restrictions that are unclear.

Maybe the best one could hope for is a source-available license a la tarsnap. But that would pretty much make oni2 a closed (no external collaborators) project.

Maybe that's your intention?

You can find the motivations for the license change here: https://github.com/onivim/oni2/blob/master/docs/MOTIVATION.m...

Basically a large part of the motivations is that OSS is not sustainable with funding alone. It's a good point that it might need further clarification about what "non commercial" means.

From the license itself: “NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.”

This is a dangerous clause, “commercial advantage” could encompass a lot. I would not use this editor as a result of that clause.

https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpre...

> I would not use this editor as a result of that clause.

Because it is too closed or for fear that works created using the editor would make your use commercial? Surely the license only applies to the code?

Edit: Okay, I'm not sure, this is what they say on their GitHub

> Oni 2 is licensed under the CC-BY-NC-4.0 license.

> This means that Oni 2 is free to use for non-commercial or educational uses. You are free to distribute and modify Oni 2 for personal use, as long as this README and License are included unmodified.

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