Non-Commercial Licenses Are Non-Free Licenses

https://susam.in/cafe/non-commercial-licenses-are-non-free-licenses.html

by susam • 5 years ago

105 158 5 years ago

This is true in a technical sense. Restrictions on commercial use are incompatible with a very specific interpretation of what "free" means. I could also invent a definition of freedom that was contrived to be incompatible with copy-left licenses and then write a post about how those aren't "truly free" either.

I'm not terribly convinced this legalistic nitpicking is really the right discussion though. I think the real questions here are normative. If I want to share my code freely with hobbyists and individuals, while ensuring that Amazon can't just steal it, pervert it into something I hate, and then borrow my own reputation to help them sell it, is it morally bad to add a license that stops this behavior?

From a developer's perspective: Why should code be 100% Certified Free™ instead of 95%, or even 50%? Is it a moral imperative to make code truly free, or an aesthetic ideal? What harms come from a CC-BY-NC license relative to MIT and why do those harms matter? I think answers to these questions are much harder and more interesting to come by than splitting hairs over the semantics of freedom.

sneak6• 5 years ago

Yes, it's morally bad to restrict the freedoms of others when not doing so causes no harm to yourself.

Amazon can't "steal" something that is given freely. That's the whole point of free software: it's no longer up to you how others get to use it.

The core idea of copyrights and ownership of sequences of bytes is the problem. We need to stop thinking of information as something that it is possible to own.

academia_hack2• 5 years ago

This is a fair point, although not in great alignment with many of the norms that keep society working outside of tech.

However, don't all (or nearly all) licenses imply restrictions of some sort? Do you think code should just be released CC0/Public Domain or are certain restrictions (like copy-left) worth the cost?

PontifexMinimus2• 5 years ago

We need to stop thinking of information as something that it is possible to own.

Sure. But until we reach that world, software licenses have a place.

cdent• 5 years ago

If an entity makes profit off the back of my labour without compensation a reasonable case could be made that harm has been done to me.

Or at least a labourer may legitimately claim they wish to share "freely" only to some. And they can also choose to change their mind on any subsequent work.

This is especially the case when the entities involved are corporate, not individual humans.

bsza2• 5 years ago

Information should definitely be something you can own, and you seem to understand this perfectly, because yesterday you wrote:

"I would feel a lot more comfortable with this if it didn't collect any data of mine"

PontifexMinimus2• 5 years ago

This is true in a technical sense. Restrictions on commercial use are incompatible with a very specific interpretation of what "free" means.

I agree with this. I'll go further: any software license, other than "do whatever you like with this work", imposes some restrictions on what you can do with it, and therefore is, in some sense restricting freedom.

However, the sense that it is restricting freedom is not a particularly useful one.

josephcsible6• 5 years ago

Not every restriction restricts freedom. For example, a license being copyleft only restricts power: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.en.html

dalbasal• 5 years ago

I agree with your point on semantics. "Free Software" means whatever you define it to mean.

That said, sharing your code to be used in certain ways, not others, or for purposes you hate is maintaining control. That is relevant to "is it free?" I don't think it's morally bad, unless you take an absolutist stance that all software must be free.

To the normative point... As more of the software industry is concentrated in monopolies, the benefits of Free Software tend to concentrate there too. At that point, it's harder to feel good about it and sharing your code selectively often feels better. I also think that server side software breaks some of the Free Software logic. Users of the software aren't technically users, and they don't inherit Free Software's rights. Again, this makes the normative point bland and unattractive.

seba_dos16• 5 years ago

is it morally bad to add a license that stops this behavior?

Maybe not, but such a license will stop me from including it into Debian or other distros that provide Free Software only, and I won't be able to use your code in or mix with projects under a copyleft license such as GPL. If that's what your intention is, then go for it. If not, maybe rethink.

user-the-name4• 5 years ago

But is that a problem with that license, or is it a problem with Debian?

This is a discussion worth having, instead of sweeping it under the rug with "well that's how we've always done it".

kongin9• 5 years ago

And a GPL license will stop it from being included in OpenBSD.

So what?

api6• 5 years ago

Debian has a "non-free" repository. Perhaps it needs a tag for source-available licenses that are not unencumbered enough for core Debian.

ashtonkem9• 5 years ago

So? Sure, using a non-commercial license means you can’t ship with Debian, but that doesn’t mean the project can’t be successful in the eyes of the person who put all the labor in. Perhaps they value being non-commercial above being included in Debian, and that’s their right to make that decision.

Sure, it might not be useful to you, but you’re not the one putting in the labor in this hypothetical scenario.

lmm5• 5 years ago

Beyond the specific arguments for why commercial use is important (which the likes of the FSF do make), I think it's also important to draw a line in the sand and say what is and isn't permissible, or our freedoms will be nibbled away one bite at a time. The free software definition might not be perfect, but it's a coordination point that the community can stand behind and say: this far, but no further.

kongin9• 5 years ago

The argument we're making is that it's a line that made sense in 1980s academia when you wanted printer drivers.

Less so in 2020s real life where we are a hair width away from smart dust total surveillance.

abetusk• 5 years ago

The end goal is to enrich the commons. While the copy-left aspect of many of these licenses are forcing people to obey the golden rule, the intent is clearly to curtail bad corporate actors to make sure if it is used, it remains in the commons.

My concern with non-commercial and non-derivative licensed works is having someone now gate keep access to the work. This has a chilling effect on use as anyone using it now clearly knows the author didn't want their work used for anything outside of "showing to your friends".

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?

You say you want to target hobbyists. Say I'm spending my time investing in learning your library and I want to use it in my job because I think it's cool and I've gained familiarity with it. Now I'm in the position of asking you for permission of whether I can use it or not. My time would have been better spent investing in something that told me from the outset I had permission to use it.

You don't want people using your explicit approval, that's your prerogative and NC and ND are for you. If you want people to have control over the tools they learn, use and deploy, then it needs to be under a libre/free license.

It's more than aesthetics. Putting a non-commercial license on works, especially software, is a death knell.

kongin9• 5 years ago

If you want people to have control over the tools they learn, use and deploy, then it needs to be under a libre/free license.

I'm old enough to remember having this exact argument on dial up bbs's on why the BSD and MIT licenses were the only true free software licenses and the GPL wasn't. After all the GPL limits my freedom as a developer to not have to share all the source code I write as part of a program.

The argument is as wrong then as it is now: the freedom isn't for you, it's for everyone.

It doesn't help that that a bunch of squatters came into the commons and stole the words for free software and open source, those words were used long before the FSF and OSI stole them from the rest of us and they didn't mean at all what they were redefined to mean.

At least the FSF had the self awareness to realize that they needed a new word and tried for libre.

stonemetal12• 5 years ago

How does that compare to closed source software? Are you allowed to talk about Windows or C# in a blog post? /s

This reads as "I don't like it, so how much hand wringing can I do?"

If the project doesn't provide a clear road to commercial use like MySQL did or SQLite(Public domain but sells licenses for places that don't recognize public domain) does, then it is hobby only. Don't bother picking it up if you are looking for something that you could use in the day job. Why? Because even if they will sell you a license they aren't setup to support a business.

eloff2• 5 years ago

It's more than aesthetics. Putting a non-commercial license on works, especially software, is a death knell.

I disagree. If you don't do that and Amazon kills your business model as a result, you now have to fire all your developers and abandon the software. Now that's a death knell!

I'm happy to use open source licenses for hobby software that I may or may not continue maintaining. For anything I hope to build a business around, I would never consider an OSI license anymore in this new cloud world. Amazon basically killed that open source business model.

phkahler3• 5 years ago

> 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.

ignoramous3• 5 years ago

If I want to share my code freely with hobbyists and individuals, while ensuring that Amazon can't just steal it, pervert it into something I hate, and then borrow my own reputation to help them sell it, is it morally bad to add a license that stops this behavior?

It isn't morally bankrupt but it is in contradiction to "share my code freely". Libre sharing of code with others invites contributions, which may or may not take the form of commercial enterprise around the fringes and/or of the code in-question itself. Think WordPress and Linux/RedHat; and not Redis and ElasticSearch. I agree that companies like Docker that created real value couldn't capture it all for themselves, but that's down to the rest of the ecosystem catching up to them and eventually overhauling them (some would argue, this is how it is supposed to work). If it is any consolation, they did end up creating an enormous amount of value with an industry changing innovation, but that happened on back of permissive licensing.

You cite Amazon as an example, but as one counter, AWS now employs the RTOS lead developer and continue to fund the effort. Something similar happened when Rust-lang engineers were let go by Mozilla. So, it isn't all bed of nails.

I hack on FOSS full-time, and in my view, favouring permissive licenses over restrictive ones is how the FOSS ecosystem flourished in the first place. Besides, unlike other forms of work, digital work inherently wants to be free. There's no caging it. And in letting it be is how we let it grow.

user-the-name4• 5 years ago

And in letting it be is how we let it grow.

Is it? Can you truly support this argument?

I can't work on open-source code full time without getting paid. I have bills to pay. If I release a project, try to make some money on the side, and Amazon swoops in, takes all my code, and offers it for less than I can afford, I will have to stop working on it.

Does the software still grow now?

kumarsw• 5 years ago

Non-commercial clauses seem to be a good fit for software that is someone's "day job" where they charge for licenses. It's not common, but I've run across the following projects:

Duplicacy by Gilbert Chen https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy

Dome by Federico Milano http://faraday1.ucd.ie/dome.html

Fman by Michael Herrmann https://fman.io

From what I've gathered, success has been mixed. Duplicacy seems to be doing well based on forum activity and release history. Fman never made much money. If I recall correctly the Fman author was turned off by the number of people who criticized it for being fully open-source and wished he'd stuck with a closed-source full commercial model. I'd like for the open-source community to be more accepting of this model as there is potential value in it. As an example, Mathematica still refuses to let anyone not employed by the company see the source code, which creates a reproducibility/validation problem for math researchers. While Steven Wolfram understandably rejects pleas to make the software FOSS, there is real benefit in letting people see the code.

Edit: Fixed names

ghaff8• 5 years ago

It's effectively what you had in the Freeware for personal use only and Shareware (supposed to pay after a trial period) worlds. In practice, it was mostly companies that paid. When I had a small shareware business about half my revenues came from site licensing and the rest were split between individuals and companies.

The software wasn't open source but, as a practical matter, for solo developer projects it worked pretty much the same way.

mherrmann• 5 years ago

Michael Herrmann. Thank you for the mention ;-)

The post you mentioned about being criticized for not being open source: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/

Macha2• 5 years ago

Duplicacy by Raymond Chen

Gilbert Chen is a different person to Raymond Chen, unless I'm missing something?

da_chicken• 5 years ago

This is true in a technical sense. Restrictions on commercial use are incompatible with a very specific interpretation of what "free" means. I could also invent a definition of freedom that was contrived to be incompatible with copy-left licenses and then write a post about how those aren't "truly free" either.

Look, don't pretend that you don't know that the FSF doesn't exist, or that that is what is conventionally meant by Free Software.

Yes, English does have plain meanings for the word "free". However, you're not really doing yourself any favors here. You just sound like you're being willful or stubborn about the term Free Software. I agree that it's a poor term, but it's the term that has been selected. Complaining now in 2021 about computer terms devised in the mid 1980s is fruitless at best.

From a developer's perspective: Why should code be 100% Certified Free™ instead of 95%, or even 50%? Is it a moral imperative to make code truly free, or an aesthetic ideal? What harms come from a CC-BY-NC license relative to MIT and why do those harms matter? I think answers to these questions are much harder and more interesting to come by than splitting hairs over the semantics of freedom.

Okay, so, if you look at the FSD link in the article [0], the very first thing is the four software freedoms:

- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The second thing in the FSD article explains why NC isn't Free:

“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial”. On the contrary, a free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. This policy is of fundamental importance—without this, free software could not achieve its aims.
We want to invite everyone to use the GNU system, including businesses and their workers. That requires allowing commercial use. We hope that free replacement programs will supplant comparable proprietary programs, but they can't do that if businesses are forbidden to use them. We want commercial products that contain software to include the GNU system, and that would constitute commercial distribution for a price. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. Paid, professional support for free software fills an important need.
Thus, to exclude commercial use, commercial development or commercial distribution would hobble the free software community and obstruct its path to success. We must conclude that a program licensed with such restrictions does not qualify as free software.

In other words, your open source, NC software will never achieve success because it's chosen to exclude one of the major causes for software success and distribution: commercial adoption. By extension, you've told all commercial systems to go build their own proprietary system and sell that instead. You've forced commercial systems to compete with your software. You've created a monster, because commercial enterprise is always going to have more resources than you do. You've ensured that if your software's purpose is necessary and important, your software will fail.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

amatheus• 5 years ago

Maybe we should talk about ethical licenses instead of free ones then. Then the purpose would be clearer.

st_goliath• 5 years ago

Quite recently, a different group already adopted the term "ethical license". Ironically for licenses that attempt to discriminate against certain groups of people, thus also violating both the OSI and FSF definitions.

So yes, that is apparently already thing now and distinct from "free" or "open source".

[1] https://perens.com/2019/10/12/invasion-of-the-ethical-licens...

[2] https://perens.com/2019/09/23/sorry-ms-ehmke-the-hippocratic...

smichel17• 5 years ago

I think the second part of this post makes a more compelling argument against NC licensing.

https://blog.wolftune.com/2011/07/brain-parts-song-video.htm...

The core point:

The Creative Commons Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) license (and also the BY-NC-SA license) substantially hampers the creation of non-commercial derivative works!

In short, it's because BY-NC is incompatible with BY-SA, and the latter is probably enough to discourage exploitative commercial use, anyway.

rossy2• 5 years ago

Yes! It's a huge peeve of mine when two well-meaning free software projects can't share code because of unintentional licence incompatibility. Throwing non-commercial licences into the mix would worsen things a lot.

atsmyles2• 5 years ago

This is true. Period. Controlling the use of software is always not free. If I made a project with a license that said that anyone can use the software except for those who control the use of their software, I wouldn't be able to use my own software. As far as the developer goes, you can license your code however you like. But don't claim the moral high ground. These non commercial licenses are no different than proprietary software.

api6• 5 years ago

By that argument the GPL is not free because it prevents me from (legally) stripping all the copyrights off and incorporating all the code into a commercial product.

Thiez• 5 years ago

If I made a project with a license that said that anyone can use the software except for those who control the use of their software, I wouldn't be able to use my own software.

That scenario is clearly wrong and absurd. You don't need a license to use your own intellectual property, and thus cannot be bound by that license in any way.

red_trumpet• 5 years ago

If I want to share my code freely with hobbyists and individuals, while ensuring that Amazon can't just steal it, pervert it into something I hate, and then borrow my own reputation to help them sell it, is it morally bad to add a license that stops this behavior?

This is where the AGPL (at least for code) comes into play, which mostly is enough to prohibit Amazon from taking your code and hosting (a modification of it) on their servers.

account42• 5 years ago

Restrictions on [...] use are incompatible with [...] what "free" means

Yes.

dtagames• 5 years ago

I don't think it's the semantics that matter. It's the use case. If you rely on a library with a non-permissive license (ala, something tighter than MIT), then you are restricted (aka, not free) to use it in those cases, like commercialization in the case of the mentioned licenses.

This is a Very Bad Thing because it keeps really good software from making it into commercial use over fear of the restrictions in the license. (APGL bans are great example.)

greyface-• 5 years ago

OSI, FSF, GNU, et al. do not have a trademark on the term "free". The OSI once applied to the USPTO for a trademark on "open source" and was denied: https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...

josephcsible6• 5 years ago

Words don't need to be trademarked to have a meaningful definition.

hgs32• 5 years ago

Who gets to decide the definition? The blog uses the definition "Note that when we say 'free' here, we mean free as in speech, not free as in beer," but I would argue "free for non-commercial use" licenses _are_ inherently free as in speech, but not beer.

MaxBarraclough2• 5 years ago

Right. The terms power and force are not trademarked, but anyone who tries to argue that physicists are using these terms incorrectly can expect to be laughed out of the room. That's as it should be.

gampleman• 5 years ago

I mostly here care about the outcomes. On the one hand we have a huge wealth of libraries that can be easily installed, easily debugged (as you have access to the source), one can understand the inner working and be inspired, one can easily fix the bugs that bother him, and so on. These are clear benefits of the open source ecosystem.

On the other hand we have burnt out understaffed teams of maintainers supporting huge swaths of our digital infrastructure who do it essentially for free and who find it somewhat unfair that companies raking in the billions can't spare a $10/mo donation.

So we want to have our cake and eat it too. And realistically the main lever of power individual developers have (and traditionally had) are licenses and copyright law. So that's where the most likely fix to the situation is likely to be.

Without acknowledging a providing realistic solutions to the above problem this principled purism of some OSS advocates seems counterproductive to me.

elondaits• 5 years ago

The big problem with "Non-Commercial" licenses is that they don't come with a strict definition of what's "Commercial". A non-profit charging to cover some costs (event at a loss) might be considered commercial... but what if a corporation uses or distributes the NC content completely for free? It should be considered commercial, because they're getting value out of it.

... And then you realize that most of the time everybody gets value, in some way, out of their work. So even if there are clear whites and blacks the gray area is insurmountable.

dspillett3• 5 years ago

A non-profit charging to cover some costs (event at a loss) might be considered commercial.

I would default to considering anything attracting funds through charging as commercial. The fact they are choosing not to try make a profit is not significant in itself. I'd prefer such cases to ask, and I'll hand out a perpetual (but non-transferable) free licence if I consider their cause, and how they are running it, to be a good one.

mnw21cam2• 5 years ago

And this raises the other point. If I license my software under a non-free license such as CC-BY-NC-SA, there is absolutely nothing stopping me from licensing it additionally under a different license. I can do that if I'm the copyright owner.

It becomes more difficult when there are multiple contributors to the software, and therefore multiple copyright owners. You would have to obtain the permission of all of the copyright holders before you can do that.

There are ways around this. For example, people submitting contributions to a project can be asked to agree to hand over copyright of their contributions, though this might not fly in all jurisdictions. Alternatively, all contributors could be asked to agree to delegate licensing decisions to the project lead team.

ddevault3• 5 years ago

You have a right to distribute the software you right under any terms you wish. If you are sick of tech giants using free software without giving back, then you're entitled to use some other licensing model. But you cannot change the meaning of free software.

The terms "free software" and "open source" have a specific meaning in the software ecosystem. The former is defined by the Free Software Definition and the latter by the Open Source Definition, respectively published by the FSF and OSI. These definitions both require that the software is available for commercial use without restriction, among other things.

These terms do not need to be trademarked to make their misuse wrong, in the same way that advertising cakes when you actually sell pizzas is wrong. Making cakes is fine, and making pizzas is fine, but a pizza store misleading its customers because they want to get in on the cake market is not fine.

The success of free and open source software attracts those who wish to reap its benefits without agreeing to its terms. This is wrong, and needs to stop. You cannot have a commercial monopoly over your FOSS projects; if you insist on one, then your projects are not FOSS.

https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...

chrisseaton• 5 years ago

Maybe we should say 'OSI Certified' instead of 'open source'.

kongin9• 5 years ago

The terms "free software" and "open source" have a specific meaning in the software ecosystem. The former is defined by the Free Software Definition and the latter by the Open Source Definition, respectively published by the FSF and OSI. These definitions both require that the software is available for commercial use without restriction, among other things.

Problem: The OSI did not coin the term 'open source'. OSI partisans claim that Christine Peterson coined the term at a strategy meeting in Palo Alto on 3 February 1998. However, the term and the concept was well known prior to that. Martin Tournoij does a decent enough job of collecting prior citations [1] that go all the way back to 1990. All the OSI did was take an existing philosophy, scribble some new restrictions in crayon, and called it Open Source(tm)(c)(pat. pending).

Honestly, though, I do love it when this comes up. It gives me the opportunity to irk new guys telling them that Lyle Ball, head of public relations at Caldera, has an earlier citation than the OSI in the form of a press-release announcing Caldera OpenDOS[2][3]. :D

[1] https://www.arp242.net/open-source.html

[2] http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html

[3] http://ftp.uni-bayreuth.de/pc/caldera/OpenDOS.701/license.tx...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26504021

ddevault3• 5 years ago

True, but the term has evolved nonetheless, and its present meaning is related to the OSI. Language evolves. I would argue that this definition has settled upon a useful, objective meaning, and that its utility ought to be preserved by using new terms (or other, existing terms, like "source available") rather than trying to force its further "evolution" in whatever direction happens to be convenient for your project and/or commercial interest.

ghaff8• 5 years ago

The bigger practical problem is: What is commercial? Here's something I wrote almost 15 years ago. [0]

Sure, we can agree that certain things like a grade school project are not commercial. They're also trivial and pretty much uninteresting from a license perspective.

Though see this case. [1] It was dismissed but basically Federal Express was sued because it made a profit off making copies of non-commercially CC licensed educational materials.

CC spent years trying to come up with an NC definition and as far as I know nothing ever came out of it and the closest they got was pretty much tied to US tax code not-for-profit status.

So even if you dismiss the philosophical concerns, while I've personally made peace with using non-commercial licensed (photographs mostly) for certain uses that you could argue both ways on, I'm not sure how legally defensible it would be if push came to shove.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/does-the-noncommercial-creative-co...

[1] https://creativecommons.org/2017/02/24/update-great-minds-v-...

Certhas• 5 years ago

Just because there are grey areas doesn't mean there aren't also clear cut cases that are ruled out.

If I publish a book as CC-BY-NC you can't turn around and offer it verbatim on Amazon for some fee.

This is useful, and the use of NC in the context of text and media strikes me as quite different to the case for software.

ghaff8• 5 years ago

You are correct that there are also cases where use is clearly commercial. Simply selling the licensed work is one although I expect the sort of person who does that doesn't really care much about the license.

Another is probably things like advertising but if the organization has any sort of legal department, they're probably going to want to confirm that you have rights to the work in question.

And then, as I say, there's a vast middle ground about which different people have differing strong opinions.

mytailorisrich3• 5 years ago

It looks like your example [1] was actually rather clear cut based on the actual use of the work and case law quoted in the court decision.

I think in most cases it is actually clear what "non-commercial use" looks like.

ghaff8• 5 years ago

It did spend four years going through the legal system even if, as a layperson, it seems clear cut and a dumb case.

My primary interest is using photographs and I can pretty much guarantee that almost any use I might have beyond something like wallpaper on my personal computer, some number of people would argue is commercial because it has some connection, even if tenuous, to either my day job or other businesses.

Ennea• 5 years ago

I get the arguments and the point of this, I suppose. But I keep asking myself: what does it mean? What conclusion do you draw from it? You're differentiating between free and non-free licenses, but what for?

erezsh3• 5 years ago

Exactly. They're trying to phrase it like a philosophical non-judgemental distinction. But if it contains no judgement, then what's the point?

In my view, the whole thing is a fallacy. Freedom is always in degrees. I can't take existing GPL software and claim that I wrote it. It is limiting my speech. So is it not free?

The thing is, "free" is a word with positive connotations. And "non-free" sounds bad. So what we're seeing is people with different ideologies, each trying to draw the border at what "free" should mean in that context, in order to fit their perspective and agenda.

The sooner we admit this, the sooner we can drop this hair-splitting and ask the actual question behind it -- which approach to licensing is better for the world?

danShumway10• 5 years ago

But if it contains no judgement, then what's the point?

I would flip the question around. We've seen a number of companies like Mongo put real effort into claiming that they should be considered Free (as in speech) software. They didn't have to do that, but they thought it was worthwhile to do so.

My feeling is that the philosophical distinction does matter, or else people and companies wouldn't get so bent out of shape when it's pointed out that their licenses are philosophically different. There is a lot of reputation and public perception rolled up into words like "Free/Libre content", and into words like "Open Source".

I am, to a certain degree, genuinely sorry that "Free" as it is used here has an inherent positive connotation. But also, it's not our fault that society standardized around a word that had a positive connotation. And it is not true at all that the entirety of the positive connotation around Free/Libre software came from the word "Free", Open Source advocates have fought hard to distinguish between Freedom and commercial cost.

You're right that this is a fight over connotations, that's all it is. But you're wrong in saying that there's not a fundamental difference between GPL and Non-Commercial licenses. Being able to accurately and quickly describe, label, and search for a category of software/content is important, and it is valid to be upset about putting a ton of activism and time into building a category of software/content, and then having a bunch of other people come in who fundamentally do not understand why those distinctions exist or why they matter -- and then for those people to argue that they get to use those connotations now, and Free Software advocates need to go away and start over from scratch if they want new terms that describe what they mean by "freedom".

You're also right that Freedom is a continuum, but you're wrong that this means we should stop trying to define the word. Right now we're fighting over whether Non-Commercial licenses are "Free". There are licenses that do not even meet the minimum CC definitions that want to label themselves as Free. There are music licenses that openly label themselves as Copyright Free that have restrictions on whether they can be shared or where they can be embedded or streamed, even for Non-Commercial products. They want (and in fact are) also participating in this debate.

So because this a continuum, and because there really is no clear, universal cutoff point where we can say something isn't Free, there is thus a large benefit in setting up a clear standard to prevent the continual erosion of the word "Free". There is a large benefit in being able to search for terms like "Open Source" or "Free/Libre" being confident that you'll get back a category of content/software that will meet at least a minimum standard threshold for what rights they'll guarantee.

See also words like Vegan. Reducing animal harm is a continuum as well. There are different standards of Veganism, and grey areas where different people disagree on what does and doesn't count. Different parts of the Vegan world are more strict about wax coatings and micro-ingredients. But broadly, we still have a cutoff point where almost across the board we don't consider stuff like beeswax to be Vegan. And if someone comes and argues that animal harm is a continuum and we're just arguing over connotations and definitions, and a piece of food that's vegan but has honey is still better than a steak, my response is going to be, "yeah, so? What's your point?" We want a category that makes it easy to find stuff in the grocery store, and we want a well-defined standard so we can narrow down where people are on that continuum of reducing harm. The same is true of Open Source and Libre software.

emilfihlman• 5 years ago

Anything but dedicating to public domain is non-free.

Or we can just not kid ourselves and agree that there are various definitions for free and none of them are better than the other.

jglauche• 5 years ago

Having seen a lot of CC-BY-NC licenses in my 3d printing days, most of the creators who chose this license don't want big companies to rip off the idea and make a lot of money with it. But the problem is that If I make any money on it (say I want to play a song on twitch where I do like 5$ a month) in my perception this is commercial use, so I can't use it.

Or back then I had a small company any wouldn't make much money but avoid CC-BY-NC licenses because they are all vague and I know of at least one case of a creator actually going against small shops via legal action.

ashtonkem9• 5 years ago

If “free” must include the right for massive corporations to take your unpaid labor and extract profits from it, then I’m not sure the author and I have the same definition of freedom. Or, perhaps, I have zero interest in a setup that seems to benefit only a small number of parties, regardless of how you may argue that it’s actually “freedom”.

api6• 5 years ago

The entire FOSS movement is stuck in the 1980s-1990s and has not adapted to the new business and computing environment of the 21st century.

Source code is far less relevant to freedom today. The new closed is closed runtimes and closed data. I can run a service based on 100% open source software that I either use from others or produce myself, and if the runtime and user data are behind a paywall the result is something that is more closed than closed-source software.

At least with closed-source software you can still run it. I can take a file produced by a 1980s DOS program and load it up under that program in DOSBox on a computer today. I also have all the data I ever made, and if I want to put in the effort to reverse engineer the format could extract it or port it to some other format. My data is my data. None of this can be done with hosted SaaS. Cloud is the new closed and is far more closed than the old closed.

We confuse free "as in beer" with free "as in freedom." These two are actually at odds. If all software is free "as in beer," it becomes impossible to field any business model that prioritizes the user. The only available business models are closed-data/closed-runtime SaaS, usually with a healthy dose of lock-in and surveillance capitalism, or closed super-locked-down hardware like Apple's iOS that effectively achieves SaaS levels of lock-down but at the edge.

A model in which the user pays directly for the software is necessary (but not sufficient) to enable software that actually prioritizes the user. (The other necessary condition is at least some users exercising discernment and purchasing software that doesn't treat them like shit.) If you can't sell software, you either have to sell the user (surveillance capitalism), exploit/con the user (gambling-based models like loot boxes), or find some other way to erect a paywall (SaaS, locked-down hardware).

Free "as in beer" means honest straightforward business models are impossible.

Finally the idea that all software even can be free "as in beer" is a fantasy, especially when you go beyond bare bones open source code that requires a lot of expert setup or "geek tools." Software that non-geeks can actually use requires exponentially more effort to produce and maintain than open source projects that are made for programmers by programmers.

Getting a program to work is often maybe 5-10% of the effort, with the other 90-95% being UI/UX. Worse, UI/UX is the sort of work that most programmers do not find fun. As a result they have to be paid to do it, which is why few if any truly free "as in beer" open source products have broken out beyond hacker subcultures and IT/developer audiences (unless they are used as a hidden platform or component in providing something else, like Google's massive surveillance capitalist empire running on Linux).

IMHO we need to re-think the entire open source social contract from the perspective of how to maximize freedom (and privacy) in today's world. Dogmatism is the largest impediment to this, but I also have the sense that the institutional side of open source (e.g. OSI) is completely captured and in the pocket of FAANG companies that do not want anything to change. I recall a FOSDEM lecture a while ago on "threats to open source" that read a bit like this article, and the presenter was a lawyer for Facebook. If organizations like OSI won't help, we need new organizations. We may also need new terminology.

Edit: AFAIK Richard Stallman would probably agree with at least some of the things I say above. He argued on several occasions that open source did not always have to imply free as in no payment or no economic model. The GPL has issues that hamstring its adoption and is not the right answer to this, but it's still one of the better licenses for open source ventures that want to dual-license or prevent SaaSification.

zokier• 5 years ago

Getting a program to work is often maybe 5-10% of the effort, with the other 90-95% being UI/UX

Just because you can spend 90+% of effort on UX doesn't mean that it is necessary or even beneficial.

danShumway10• 5 years ago

Finally the idea that all software even can be free "as in beer" is a fantasy, especially when you go beyond bare bones open source code that requires a lot of expert setup or "geek tools."

You don't see any irony at all in saying this as an argument against calling Non-Commercial licenses Non-Free?

This is the content that by law can't be used to fund anything, at all, including freedom-preserving software. Ironically, the best legal chance you have at getting away with funding a product that includes Non-Commercial licensed content is probably ads/donations, which you seem to dislike.

If all software is free "as in beer," it becomes impossible to field any business model that prioritizes the user

So how exactly are licenses that literally require you to make everything built on top of them free (as in beer) helping with this? If you don't believe that free (as in beer) software/content is worthwhile or feasible to make in the long term, than these Non-Commercial licenses aren't contributing anything worthwhile to the commons, because they can't be used to fund anything. Anything built on top of them will always be the kind of low-effort unsustainable software that you decry here.

If what you're saying is true, then producers of Non-Commercial licensed content might as well just license that stuff as straight proprietary in the first place and stop pretending to be occupying a middle ground.

danShumway10• 5 years ago

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

api6• 5 years 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.

ashtonkem9• 5 years ago

My issue here is that the entire conversation is presupposed on the notion that freedom and non-commercial are diametrically opposed. I reject that framing.

mnw21cam2• 5 years ago

I think the Debian example is a useful one here. If you release your software under a NC license, then it can't be integrated into Debian. The reason for this is that Debian is freely available for anyone to download and install. Someone in a large commercial company who installs Debian onto a random computer must be able to press the "install everything" button, and not be exposed to the hazard of accidentally installing something that (due it its commercial use inside a company) is in violation of its license. Even if it were a little CPU usage status widget in the bottom corner of the screen, that would be a violation. If Debian didn't enforce this set of rules on acceptable licenses, then the freedom to install the OS would not be there. I don't think anyone could really argue with a straight face that Debian shouldn't be free to install in commercial situations.

ashtonkem9• 5 years ago

Obviously, the Debian project is free to do whatever it wants. There are a variety of choices I can make that would make my projects incompatible with Debian’s requirements, and that’s fine.

What gets my hackles up is when developers are accused of not supporting “freedom” when they don’t allow the fruits of their labor to be used for someone else’s profits.

D13Fd2• 5 years ago

Free for non-commercial use sounds good until you think about it. Basically everything is commercial in some way.

An artist? Commercial if they ever want to sell their art. A writer? Same.

A hobbyist with a blog? Probably commercial, if they are using the blog to promote themselves. A friendly neighborhood IT guy? Probably commercial given that they are competing with others and that they probably get some form of compensation (e.g. free beer) from time to time.

It’s really hard to think of safely non-commercial uses.

gpm3• 5 years ago

It’s really hard to think of safely non-commercial uses.

Schools, politicians, militaries (and a lot of other parts of the government) people doing stuff just for fun (and not for beer).

It's easy to think of them, I'm just not sure they're the use cases you actually want to be free. Did you really intend to subsidize the <country you don't like here>'s military and <politician you don't like here>'s campaign but not your local maker space that charges a bit of money for entrance to support itself?

D13Fd2• 5 years ago

I’m not sure if I’d categorize all military, political, and government uses of copyrighted media as “non-commercial.” For example, if they use your photo or video in an advertisement that they pay to have played on TV, is that still non-commercial? That’s sounds pretty commercial to me.

dspillett3• 5 years ago

A hobbyist with a blog? Probably commercial, if they are using the blog to promote themselves.

Or if the blog carries advertising. In that case they are making something off carrying the adverts (or why else would they?) and the content is becoming part of the advertisers' (and the people in the middle's) business plan.

For some content there is another distinction too: are they using the content or referring to it? Copying a large chunk of an article into their blog (or book or whatever) and quoting part of it (with attribution) are quite different things (the latter usually covered by "fair use" concepts).

phkahler3• 5 years ago

It looks like there are too many CC-XX licenses and they talk about incompatibility. This is the same issue I have with OSI and their "open source" licenses.

For software there are IMHO a very small set of relevant licenses: MIT/BSD (IMHO we don't need both), GPL/LGPL, and regular commercial licenses. It bothers me that there are other free software licenses like Apache and MPL (probably bothers me because I don't yet understand the differences) but it is still a relatively small set. I suppose AGPL is also a reasonable desire for some people given the rise of SaaS, but even throwing that in the mix results in incompatibility with a lot of code.

ghaff8• 5 years ago

Basically Apache is a more "modern" license in the MIT/BSD vein that has language related to patents and perhaps other things that make lawyers more comfortable. I believe the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now requires Apache for new projects under the foundation. (The Apache Software Foundation also has a lot of projects associated with it as well of course.) And MIT's probably more common for individuals and small projects that just want a basic license without a lot of legal language they don't really understand.

karmakaze• 5 years ago

I recognize about 4 levels of software freedom: MIT, LGPL, GPL, APGL. Other licenses can also fall into these level categories.

Special licenses like 'everyone except Amazon' seems 'for the people', but really it isn't, AGPL is. The reason people want these special licenses is because they want their cake (popularity like MIT) and eat it too (make it not free in personally selected ways).

pritambaral3• 5 years ago

Special licenses like 'everyone except Amazon' seems 'for the people', but really it isn't, AGPL is. The reason people want these special licenses is because they want their cake (popularity like MIT) and eat it too (make it not free in personally selected ways).

Another common reason is that they want to be able to profit off of the code, sometimes even taking in other people's contributions, without allowing anyone else (sometimes even contributors) to profit from it.

mark_l_watson• 5 years ago

I have been considering relicensing my Creative Commons No Modifications and No Commercial Use books that I have written in the last ten years.

It would make more sense to allow derivatives with attribution, translations to other languages, and using parts in other works. I don't write for profit although when people optionally choose to pay me instead of getting a free copy, that is fun and gives me a good feeling. I write because it is a lot of fun, I meet people through my books, and I would like to be helpful.

For software, my favorite license is the AGPL although I almost never use it because, once again, when I work on something I want it to be useful and I get more usage when I use the Apache 2 license. I feel conflicted about this.

Sorry to be really off topic: I wonder what the state of software will be like in 500 years. I would guess that software will be ancient, relatively unchanging, and effectively bug free. I expect operating systems to be very static and very secure. Except for radically better AI, I question why in the distant future software has to change much in time except for brand new application categories. I also suspect that almost all software will either be Free Software of tightly controlled commercial software - I think there will be a winner.

Non-Commercial Licenses Are Non-Free Licenses

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