Non-Commercial Licenses Are Non-Free Licenses
This is true in a technical sense. Restrictions on commercial use are incompatible with a very specific interpretation of what &quot;free&quot; 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&#x27;t &quot;truly free&quot; either.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;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?<p>From a developer&#x27;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.