[License-review] Non-Commercial doesn't compose (and it never will)

Fri Apr 19 20:09:25 UTC 2019

Yes. L-R is for discussion of specific licenses, L-D is for more general
discussion.

Chris, I love your post - please repost on L-D so we can consider it
further.

S.

On Fri, 19 Apr 2019, 21:05 Kevin P. Fleming, <kevin+osi at km6g.us> wrote:

> Did this belong on license-discuss? It doesn't seem to be referring to
> any license submitted for review.
>
> On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 3:49 PM Christopher Lemmer Webber
> <cwebber at dustycloud.org> wrote:
> >
> > It's sad to see history repeat itself, but that's what history does, and
> > it seems like we're in an awfully echo'y period of time.  Given the
> > volume of submissions in favor of some sort of noncommercial style
> > license, I feel I must weigh in on the issue in general.  Most of my
> > thoughts on this developed when I worked at Creative Commons (which
> > famously includes a "noncommercial" clause that can be mixed into a few
> > licenses)*, and it took me a while to sort out why there was so much
> > conflict and unhappiness over that clause.  What was clear was that
> > Non-Commercial and No-Derivatives were both not considered "free
> > culture" licenses, and I was told this was drawn from the lessons of the
> > free software world, but here we are hashing it out again so anyway...
> >
> > * I'm not suggesting this is a CC position; Creative Commons hasn't to
> > my knowledge taken an official stance on whether NonCommercial is right,
> > and not everyone internally agreed, and also I don't work there anymore
> > anyhow.
> >
> > I thank Rob Myers for a lot of clarity here, who used to joke that NC
> > (the shorthand name for Non-Commercial) really stood for "No Community".
> > I think that's true, but I'll argue that even more so it stands for "No
> > Composition", which is just as much or more of a threat, as I hope to
> > explain below.
> >
> > As a side note, I am of course highly empathetic to the motivations of
> > trying to insert a noncommercial clause; I've worn many hats, and
> > funding the software I've worked on has by far been the hardest.  At
> > first glance, an NC approach appears to be a way to solve the problem.
> > Unfortunately, it doesn't work.
> >
> > The first problem with noncommercial is that nobody really knows for
> > sure what it means.  Creative Commons made a great effort to gather
> > community consensus, and you can read some of that here:
> >
> >   https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Defining_Noncommercial
> >
> > But my read from going through that is that it's still very "gut feel"
> > for a lot of people, and while there's some level of closeness the
> > results of the report result in nothing crisp enough to be considered
> > "defined" in my view.  Personally I think that nothing will ever hit
> > that point.  For instance, which of these is commercial, and which is
> > noncommercial?
> >
> >  - Playing music at home
> >  - Playing music overhead, in a coffee shop
> >  - A song I produced being embedded in a fundraising video by the Red
> >    Cross
> >  - Embedding my photo in a New York Times article
> >  - Embedding my photo in a Mother Jones article
> >  - Embedding my photo on Wikipedia (if you think this is a clear and
> >    easy example btw, perhaps you'd like to take a selfie with this
> >    monkey?)
> >
> > But this actually isn't the most significant part of why noncommercial
> > fails, has always failed, and will always fail in the scope of FOSS:
> > it simply doesn't compose.
> >
> > Using the (A)GPL as the approximate maxima (and not saying it's the only
> > possible maxima) of license restrictions, we still have full composition
> > from top to bottom.  Lax and copyleft code can be combined and reused
> > with all participants intending to participate in growing the same
> > commons, and with all participants on equal footing.
> >
> > Unfortunately, NC destroys the stack.  NC has the kind of appeal that a
> > lottery does: it's very fun to think about participating when you
> > imagine yourself as the recipient.  The moment you have to deal with it
> > underneath, it becomes a huge headache.
> >
> > I had an argument about this with someone I tend to work closely with,
> > they began arguing for the need to insert NC style clauses into code,
> > because developers gotta eat, which is at any rate a point I don't
> > disagree with.  But recently several of the formerly FOSS infrastructure
> > switched to using an NC license, and they began to express that this
> > opened up a minefield underneath them.  If it felt like a minefield with
> > just one or two libraries or utilities following the NC path, what will
> > happen once it's the whole system?
> >
> > What would using Debian be like if 1/4 of the packages were under NC
> > licenses?  Would you deploy it on your home machine?  Would you deploy
> > it on your personal VPS?  Would you deploy it at your corporate
> > datacenter?  Even if I am a "noncommercial" user, if my VPS is at
> > Linode, would Linode have to pay?  What about Amazon?  Worse yet...
> > *what if some of the package authors were dead or defunct*?
> >
> > To me it's no coincidence that we're seeing an interest in NC right at
> > exactly the same time that faith in proprietary relicensing of copyleft
> > code as a business strategy has begun to wane.  If you were at my talk
> > at CopyleftConf, you may have heard me talk about this in some detail
> > (and some other things that aren't relevant to this right now).
> > You can see the original table here on slide 8:
> >
> >   https://dustycloud.org/misc/boundaries-on-network-copyleft.pdf
> >
> > Not everyone's email clients will successfully reproduce the table,
> > so hopefully nested bullet points will survive better:
> >
> >  - Libre Commoner
> >    + Motivation: Protect the commons
> >    + Mitigating: Tragedy of the Commons
> >      (as in, prevent commons from being "eaten away")
> >    + Wants: Compliance
> >
> >  - Proprietary Relicensor
> >    + Motivation: Develop income
> >    + Mitigating: Free Rider Problem
> >    + Wants: Non-compliance
> >
> > The difference in the "wants" field is extremely telling: the person I
> > will call the "libre commoner" wants everyone to be able to abide by the
> > terms of the license.  The "propretary relicensor" actually hopes and
> > dreams that some people *will not* comply with the license at all,
> > because their business strategy depends on it.  And in this part, I
> > agree with Rob's "No-Community" pun.
> >
> > Let me be clear: I'm not arguing with the *desire* to pay developers in
> > this system, I'm arguing that this is a non-solution.  To recap, here
> > are the problems with noncommercial:
> >
> >  - What commercial/noncommercial are is hard to define
> >  - NC doesn't compose; a tower of noncommercial-licensed tools is
> >    a truly brittle one to audit and resolve
> >  - The appeal of NC is in non-compliance
> >
> > Noncommercial fails in its goals and it fails the community.  It sounds
> > nice when you think you'll be the only one on top, but it doesn't work,
> > and it never will.
> >
> >  - Chris
> >
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> >
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