"Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike"
Oops. Non-Commercial. Thus not open source or free software.
I'll look elsewhere.
Oops. Non-Commercial. Thus not open source or free software.
I'll look elsewhere.
Looks like it was previously GPL until 2 months ago, you could use the old version
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...
Details: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/About_The_Licenc...
PS: This still points to the old AGPL license: https://github.com/snakers4/silero-models/wiki/Licensing-and...
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."
They do not. The do not care about them as well.
> 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.
- Ones how respect licenses
- Ones who do not
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.
Well ... maybe there is a correlation?
I wouldn't enforce my license against a less affluent party either.
My experience is that I can spend my life fighting the good fight, or having fun. I'd rather have fun. Perhaps that's selfish of me -- Harvard will keep stealing -- but having taken both routes, dealing with crooks is a lot of stress and pain.
Building stuff and dealing with honest people is fun.
I'm excited about the Free Software Conservancy's copyright assignment. It feels like a V0, and I'm not ready to send my code over to them quite yet, but having someone else do the fighting on my behalf (and collect any gains too) would let me focus on having fun, while going after bad players: https://sfconservancy.org/assignment/
Come to think of it, it's an approach you might consider. Depending on your goals, they might be a good fit.
The modern Internet has drastically lowered that barrier and "non-commercial" is slightly less of an issue, as you no longer need a middle man handling the shipping. However servers still don't run for free and non-commercial creates the problem of defining what commercial use actually is. Is having ads on your page enough to make it commercial use? What if the ads aren't under your control, but automatically inserted by the hoster (Instagram, Youtube, Reddit, etc.)? Donations to keep the servers running can count as commercial and all that. It gets really tricky to draw the line and most people will just avoid anything with a "non-commercial" clause.
Meanwhile attribution and sharealike are relatively harmless. Many Free Software licenses have required similar. They tell you exactly what rules you have to follow and don't hinder the distribution or use of it.
I'd more generally point to RMS' writings from the nineties and before. They're prophetic. He gets dismissed, but it's almost scary how much he predicted correctly 30-40 years ago, and how closely open source (which started as a push-back against free software) eventually converged to what he wrote back then.
NC obviously violates the definition of Open Source. As far as I can tell it is a less well specified version of the Commons Clause license.