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> I have zero interest in a setup that seems to benefit only a small number of parties Heads up, it's not only giant companies that are restricted by Non-Comme

> I have zero interest in a setup that seems to benefit only a small number of parties Heads up, it's not only giant companies that are restricted by Non-Commercial licenses. Also, Non-Commercial licenses apply regardless of whether or not the finished product is made available in a way that respects user freedoms. CC BY-NC can't be used for commercial products even if they're made available under CC licenses. It's totally fine for you to like those licenses, I've used them in the past, I've used straight-up proprietary licenses in the past that gave my users zero freedom. But "freedom" is a completely orthogonal concept to whether or not you as a creative have the ability to monetize your work. When you look at restrictive licenses that are actually free (like the GPL), you see that they're not interested in restricting what the software is used for, just what terms derivative products can be made available under. Note that the article does not say that Share-Alike licenses are non-free. But Non-Commercial licenses are a world away from that, they restrict actual usage for everyone big and small, which yeah, that's less free. Of course it's less free, you have to have a really weird definition of freedom to disagree with that. And what's weird about this conversation is nobody's even arguing about whether Non-Commercial licenses are good, or even if they're good for preserving freedom in the long run. The article itself says: > Isn't prohibiting the usage of some artefacts for commercial purpose good for free artefacts? Maybe it is. May be it is not. That is irrelevant while deciding whether a license is considered free or not. It would be totally fine to say, "sometimes NC licenses are more appropriate for some projects than Free (as in speech) licenses." It would be totally fine to say, "sometimes Free (as in speech) licenses make it easy to take advantage of creators." Both of those statements are true. They're just apparently not enough. It feels weirdly appropriative for proprietary devs to step in and champion themselves as the real defenders of freedom because they're solely focused on economics instead of what ordinary users can actually do with their content/software. Next up we'll be hearing people claim that Copyright itself is the real freedom-preserving system because Copyright-abolition just makes it easy for Disney to steal things. If we got rid of Copyright, then indie artists wouldn't be able to monetize their work, and if you think that world is "free" then you have a different definition than me of "freedom". /s

api 5y ago
> It feels weirdly appropriative for proprietary devs to step in and champion themselves as the real defenders of freedom A proprietary developer offering something that gives the user full control of their data and full privacy is championing freedom more than an open source developer who uses FOSS as a lever to herd people into a surveillance capitalist we-own-your-data ecosystem. Cloud is the new closed.
- danShumway 5y ago
  What does this have to do with whether Non-Commercial licenses are Open Source? The FOSS movement has been incredibly clear about the threat of cloud software for years now, they were warning about this before it was a mainstream argument. And to be clear, Non-Free licenses like Mongo's that often come up during these debates do nothing to prevent people from being herded towards the cloud, and Non-Commercial licenses have nothing to do with how Non-Commercial content is distributed. There is no provision in a Non-Commercial license that says that I have to make the media I build with it available for download. If your chief objection is SAAS, then it seems more than licenses, you would be arguing that software like Mongo is inherently Non-Free simply by virtue of being a database designed for use in the cloud. Mongo's existence is funneling more users into the cloud than any license it uses. There are licenses (like AGPL, and CC SA) that can be classified as Free licenses and that do contain provisions to prevent companies from locking software and content up in a way that users can't distribute, modify, or consume in privacy-respecting ways. Those licenses preserve ownership without being Non-Free. A Non-Commercial license doesn't do any of that stuff.
  - api 5y ago
    > And to be clear, Non-Free licenses like Mongo's that often come up during these debates do nothing to prevent people from being herded towards the cloud Yes they do, but to understand why you have to look at the software economy from a whole-system point of view and pay particular attention to incentives. It's that if the only way to make money in software is cloud SaaS, that's where all the incentives flow and that's where the center of gravity goes. This is a whole-system incentives problem. Right now virtually all the incentives in software are tilted toward SaaS, cloud lock-in, and surveillance, because the other competing business model of pay-for-software has been destroyed. Mongo is also a bad example since as you point out it's software designed almost exclusively for use by cloud services. Things have gone so far down the road it's hard for me to think of good examples. The best I can do is Steam, but that's not really a great example either. It's closer than MongoDB.

api 5y ago

> It feels weirdly appropriative for proprietary devs to step in and champion themselves as the real defenders of freedom A proprietary developer offering something that gives the user full control of their data and full privacy is championing freedom more than an open source developer who uses FOSS as a lever to herd people into a surveillance capitalist we-own-your-data ecosystem. Cloud is the new closed.

danShumway 5y ago
What does this have to do with whether Non-Commercial licenses are Open Source? The FOSS movement has been incredibly clear about the threat of cloud software for years now, they were warning about this before it was a mainstream argument. And to be clear, Non-Free licenses like Mongo's that often come up during these debates do nothing to prevent people from being herded towards the cloud, and Non-Commercial licenses have nothing to do with how Non-Commercial content is distributed. There is no provision in a Non-Commercial license that says that I have to make the media I build with it available for download. If your chief objection is SAAS, then it seems more than licenses, you would be arguing that software like Mongo is inherently Non-Free simply by virtue of being a database designed for use in the cloud. Mongo's existence is funneling more users into the cloud than any license it uses. There are licenses (like AGPL, and CC SA) that can be classified as Free licenses and that do contain provisions to prevent companies from locking software and content up in a way that users can't distribute, modify, or consume in privacy-respecting ways. Those licenses preserve ownership without being Non-Free. A Non-Commercial license doesn't do any of that stuff.
- api 5y ago
  > And to be clear, Non-Free licenses like Mongo's that often come up during these debates do nothing to prevent people from being herded towards the cloud Yes they do, but to understand why you have to look at the software economy from a whole-system point of view and pay particular attention to incentives. It's that if the only way to make money in software is cloud SaaS, that's where all the incentives flow and that's where the center of gravity goes. This is a whole-system incentives problem. Right now virtually all the incentives in software are tilted toward SaaS, cloud lock-in, and surveillance, because the other competing business model of pay-for-software has been destroyed. Mongo is also a bad example since as you point out it's software designed almost exclusively for use by cloud services. Things have gone so far down the road it's hard for me to think of good examples. The best I can do is Steam, but that's not really a great example either. It's closer than MongoDB.