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Comment by dplavery92 | Hacker News Reader

I think that's a fair argument to make for GPL when you're talking about software, e.g. GIMP, which you could use to produce commercial art assets that you then sell. But for data, whether these images or audio clips or weather measurements or whatever, the requirement that derivative products also be licensed under GPL makes their use effectively non-commercial.

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CC BY-SA is copyleft like GPL and it can be used in commercial products.

I feel like you are choosing your own definition of commercial that's not generally used when talking about licensing. Generally, a non-commercial license is one which forbids you from using the creation as part of a money-making venture. The GPL does not do that.

You can still sell them. I don't get how it makes them 'non-commercial'?

In many cases this had the effect that you can sell them only once since the buyer then has everything he needs to sell it, and will presumably do so for less.

While they could sell them for less they generally cannot sell as your product (name, logo, etc) is your copyright or trademark that you do not license when you license the code GPL.

CC-SA and GPL exist precisely to prohibit this kind of thing, except for your name, logo, etc., which someone can remove in order to resell your derivative work.

I've always thought that a bit unlikely - if someone is going through the trouble to resell they take on business costs, probably some support or maintenance costs, and a desire to profit (otherwise they'd just post the GPL'ed portion publicly). There's also no guarantee the reseller has access to any updated upstream code (especially in the situation that undercutting results in the originator stopping production). Legal? Definitely. Profitable? Maybe, sometimes.

As I understand GPL it has a provision to provide source code such that it may be modified by a recipient of source or compiled code. I can't find anything similar in CC-BY-SA [1] other than a grant that the recipient of compiled code may reverse engineer that code if they desire so long as anything that person adapts is also shared under a compatible license.

[1]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode

Answers.com used to make enough ad revenue from their copies of Wikipedia pages that they sponsored Wikimania with it. And of course Cygnus, Soft Landing Software, Slackware, Red Hat, CheapBytes, and so on, have made a great deal of money on GPL software, most of which they didn't write themselves.

It's true that CC-BY-SA doesn't include the source-code-provision provision of the GPL, because it isn't intended for software, and it isn't clear what the source code for, say, a photograph would be. A PSD, maybe; but what about the RAW from your camera? What if you don't shoot raw? Are you obligated to include documentation of the photographer's lighting setup in order to redistribute? Their thinking about the framing? Shots from the other angles they tried that didn't work out? Such considerations would probably have resulted in SA works being impossible to legally redistribute in practice, so the license doesn't impose them.

I wasn't aware of Answers.com; that's a great counter-example! I knew of a few of the others before this comment and I've viewed them as providing some amount of service or support for the price paid so yes they are selling GPL they didn't write, but they're selling something else (their time) along with it.

There's certainly an argument that selling support for software you didn't write (or didn't write in large part) is 'bad'. I also believe that if you are selling the (free/gratis, GPL) software without support you're not going to be in business long.

And all good points on the differences between CC & GPL, my only point was that selling compiled CC-BY-SA binaries provided security-through-obscurity level protection from someone reselling your product (when paired with trademark protection).

Thank you for all the things to think about!

Any works you produce using the GPL'd asset must also be GPL'd. So I can put a price-tag on my movie, comic book, AI model, or tutorial, but anyone else can also copy and redistribute my work with no legal recourse from me. It's hard to see the feasibility of commercial use.

The source for the engines of the first three quake and doom games were open sourced. I purchased those games after that happened. Worth mentioning that the engines were open sourced, not the assets. The assets are obviously a big part of the experience. But if not for the open source versions of their engines (prboom, ioquake3, etc) I'd not be playing these games today.

There's plenty of GPL software being sold. Mostly things that are niche enough that nobody cares to repost the source code.

And of course with AI models you could post a AGPL version publicly and sell more permissive licenses.

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