Oh, the same rhetoric used in depth about GNU AGPL licenses as well. And so nice to read the opinions of people explaining why a corporation X is not breaking your AGPL license and can use everything for free)
The reality is much simpler - in real world anyone hardly cares about licenses, companies and corporations steal all the time, it is only the matter of the amount of money you want to invest in litigation.
The only real silver lining is that all popular software licenses basically prohibit authors from defending their rights ... most prominent FOSS things are financed by corporations as a means of competition ... an or course you (i.e. me) should use a license that deprives me of any possible rights.
A lot of these comments are speaking on behalf of small projects and small companies who cannot afford to invest any money in litigation. So
> anyone hardly cares about licenses
is patently not true. If we are convinced that corporations steal and therefore CC-NC is acceptable, then is the intent of this project to only service corporations? Because it seems quite dangerous for individual projects.
As you said, corporations steal all the time, so they're able to use this "for free". But since I'm not willing to steal, I can't use this for any sort of project because commercial activity is not well-defined as the root comment points out. Ironically, that intent doesn't seem to line up with the result.
> Oh, the same rhetoric used in depth about GNU AGPL licenses as well
Well, no, not really. When the literal author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" denounces NC as a "dangerous trap" (direct quote) and explains that the Open Source Initiative forbids any such restriction in any open-source licenses, that's meaningful.
I think the AGPL does a reasonable job of promoting its goals. It's a patch over the GPL to clarify the technical vagueness of "derivative work" that the GPL almost doesn't address, except by convention and common understanding that developed before web services were as common as they are. Where the GPL was vague and exploited, the AGPL clarifies and closes the loophole. The OSI arguably agrees with this, as the AGPL is advertised as OSI-approved.
NC, by comparison, blows a big, huge, gaping loophole that is entirely separate from ideology. It turns the code socially and especially legally radioactive to anyone who might want to work on something similar.
To me, that pushes it far to the other end of ethical. Whereas the AGPL stands for principles, NC is not just significantly less ethical, it is actually /unethical/, even more so than proprietary software, in that as far as some legal departments are concerned, it bans interested people who develop expertise from working on it or related projects.
In other words, NC actively selects for people or corporations for whom either ethics or enforcement are a distant concern.
I have a friend who develops software to help people communicate through STT and TTS and several more who active make use of it, and they would do anything to have an alternative that didn't involve paying copious amounts of money to megacorporations. Unfortunately, this means that they have to structure their software as a service model, despite wanting it to be as freely available as is viable.
So I can't express in words how excited I was to find an open-source STT when this was posted, and how immediately crushed I felt that the author actually just threw up two huge middle fingers to open-source. I know how stupid or ingenuine it might sound to claim, but it truly brings me close to tears at the cruelty. Like, WHY??? They put all this time and effort into making a viable alternative to the for-pay bullshit, and they make sure that nobody can use it except corporations without morals? What the fuck?
I wish they could feel the pain they inflicted, but I get the feeling that they don't take the licensing even half as seriously as they should.
> Where the GPL was vague and exploited, the AGPL clarifies and closes the loophole
It can be easily surpassed. Just create a simple wrapper and publish it. And voila, you are can use everything for free again)
All of these FOSS licenses are just beautiful constructs, not related to how the world really works.
A simple question. How do people, building true FOSS libraries, make their ends meet, if everything is 100% free?
> ethics or enforcement are a distant concern.
The main thing that you are missing is that ethics and capitalism are very distant concerns.
> they make sure that nobody can use it except corporations without morals? What the fuck?
We live in different worlds, man.
The summary of your complaints is that you want to use NC software or artefacts for profit (basically to resell it in some form or another) … and you cannot because you are so moral.
But … just use it not for profit, or pay the authors, if you use it for profit. Simple, right?
> even more so than proprietary software
As an experiment, try stopping to use any non 100% FOSS software (or any software you did not pay for) for a day and report the results.
Well no, the wrapper could count as a derivative work. Even if the wrapper were permissively licensed rather than copyleft, the assembled whole of a product making use of the wrapper would arguably be covered. One of the glaring issues with the GPL is that copyright law imperfectly defines "derivative work"; though this works to the GPL's advantage as the ambiguity ensures the risk is taken by whomever is attempting to make use of the library or tool.
The GPL has been litigated against fairly deep-pocketed companies, and while there hasn't been much in the way of precedent-setting court decisions, there have been multiple victories in the sense that these huge companies settled rather than set that precedent.
The GPL is explicitly constructed to exist in the real world; it was founded on the premise that the infectious nature of copyright was toxic and should be twisted to more equitable means so that software would be shared as it should be, rather than hoarded and exploited.
NC is just another form of hoarding and exploitation.
> The summary of your complaints is that you want to use NC software or artefacts for profit (basically to resell it in some form or another) … and you cannot because you are so moral.
Yes, minus the profit. I want to use the software. Improve it, redistribute it, help people make it work for them. Because unlike you or the author, I actually give a shit about ethics, and I live in the real world where software has external costs to hosting and maintenance, which involve transacting in commerce to integrate or make use of tools. I'm pretty far left and anti-capitalist, but even full-blown communism still involves transacting in commerce!
I can't even look at the fucking source code, goddammit. Using it at all would create a master-servant relationship if I wanted to, for example, take a bounty to implement an open-source feature.
It's so fucking hypocritical and stupid and selfish. They might as well take it closed-source and distribute it for free if they're going to pull this shit. Would be less harmful.
The reality is much simpler - in real world anyone hardly cares about licenses, companies and corporations steal all the time, it is only the matter of the amount of money you want to invest in litigation.
The only real silver lining is that all popular software licenses basically prohibit authors from defending their rights ... most prominent FOSS things are financed by corporations as a means of competition ... an or course you (i.e. me) should use a license that deprives me of any possible rights.