by Ciro Santilli (@cirosantilli, 34)
Figure 1. Source.
This one strikes the right balance between restriction and permissions. NC and ND are simply too restrictive.
Too restrictive. People should be able to make money from stuff.
The definition of "commercial" could also be taken in extremely broad senses, making serious reuse risky in many applications.
Notably, many university courses use it, notably MIT OpenCourseWare. Ciro wonders if it is because academics are wary of industry, or if they want to make money from it themselves. This reminds Ciro of a documentary he watched about the origins of one an early web browsers in some American university. And then that university wanted to retain copyright to make money from it. But the PhDs made a separate company nonetheless. And someone from the company rightly said something along the lines of:
The goal of universities is to help create companies and to give back to society like that. Not to try and make money from inventions.
TODO source.
The GNU project does not like it either www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#CC-BY-NC:
This license does not qualify as free, because there are restrictions on charging money for copies. Thus, we recommend you do not use this license for documentation.
In addition, it has a drawback for any sort of work: when a modified version has many authors, in practice getting permission for commercial use from all of them would become infeasible.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_NonCommercial_license#Defining_%22Noncommercial%22 also talks about the obvious confusion this generates: nobody can agree what counts as commercial or not!
In September 2009 Creative Commons published a report titled, "Defining 'Noncommercial'". The report featured survey data, analysis, and expert opinions on what "noncommercial" means, how it applied to contemporary media, and how people who share media interpret the term. The report found that in some aspects there was public agreement on the meaning of "noncommercial", but for other aspects, there is wide variation in expectation of what the term means.
Here we list public domain academic papers. They must be public domain in the country of origin, not just the US, which had generally less stringent timings with the 95 year after publication rule rather than life + 70, which often ends up being publication + 110/120. Once these are reached, they may be upload to Wikimedia Commons!
Their txt formats are so crap!
E.g. for;
wget -O pap.txt https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342.txt.utf-8
a good one is:
perl -0777 -pe 's/(?<!\r\n)\r\n(?!\r\n)( +)?/ /g' pap.txt
The ( +)? is for the endlessly many quoted letters they have, which use four leading spaces per line as a quote marker.
Created by MongoDB, attempts to be even more restrictive than AGPL by more explicitly saying that indirect automatic requests are also included in the "you must give source" domain: opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8025/difference-between-mongodb-sspl-and-gnu-agpl
The base use case is:
which is what MongoDB is trying to ensure, which sounds fair.
This is an interesting licensing model that might just scale.

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Why is this FAQ licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)? by sidstuff 0 1970-01-01
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Why is this FAQ licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)? by Libertarianism FAQ 0 1970-01-01
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At first glance, it would seem pretty ironic for an FAQ that lambasts intellectual property rights to place restrictions on its own distribution, even if just attribution. But asking for attribution is consistent with libertarianism.
It is to prevent people passing this FAQ off as their own work, as they could get social/monetary benefits from doing so, and that should be considered fraud. Even if they don't explicitly claim to be the author when using its contents, that is likely to be assumed by most readers, so not explicitly disclaiming it should be treated as fraud.
This does not mean that anyone who doesn't provide attribution must be sued into oblivion; the punishment must be proportional to the crime, after all, and in most cases, any personal clout gained from omitting attribution will be negligible. But for the very few cases where it's not, the license facilitates the prosecution of such fraud in the current legal system.
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