>> Did I use the work when talking about it in a blog post? Am I in violation because there's advertising on it? Did I use the work to help make a video that ge

>> Did I use the work when talking about it in a blog post? Am I in violation because there's advertising on it? Did I use the work to help make a video that gets a million views? Am I now in violation because I get a small income stream off of some other piece of work that used your non-commercial work on its periphery? This is where the GPL shines. It doesn't prevent commercial use in the text, it even IIRC explicitly allows it. You don't even have to think too hard to know if you're in violation (did I distribute and did I include source code?). OTOH the requirement to include full source code of derivative works under the same license clearly goes against a lot of commercial use cases. I think the distinction between software and "content" is the utility of software. With content, distribution or viewing/listening is the primary purpose of it. I suppose showing GPLed source code in a video might raise questions of weather the video needs to be GPLed, but that seems like strange edge case (can we brush it off with "fair use"?) even most authors wouldn't care too much about.