LICENSE-CC-BY-NC-SA does not parse correctly

[deobald]

It's entirely possible this is a GitHub limitation. I have yet to find a plaintext version of CC-BY-NC-SA that GitHub understands, but it would be great if we could find one and correct this repo:

[santisoler]

Hi @deobald! Thanks for noticing it. I suspect the issue is coming from GitHub license recognition method, and due to something we can fix. I don't recall if GitHub recognized that license in the past, maybe this is new or maybe this is how it always been.

I'm keeping this issue open in case anyone can throw some light to it.

[prnam]

Hey @santisoler and @deobald ,
I assume this is due to classification of this license as not free culture works and GitHub only pulls copyleft licenses particularly that meets the definition set by open source initiatives or similar definition. Here the license in question does not meet them because it restricts the use for commercial purposes.

While this is my assumption, I wanted to check if my assumption is correct by reaching GitHub support and before I do that, I thought it would good to know if you folks have already reached out to them and have anything to share!? 🤔

[prnam]

Looks like the license is not part of the GitHub choosealicense repo and needs to add a license here; and someone did try to add it and was rejected under the grounds I assumed earlier.

[santisoler]

Thanks for doing the research. Your assumption makes sense. The CC-BY-NC-SA is listed as one of the non-conformant licenses, that's why choosealicense won't accept it.

I haven't reached out to them, and based on the documents they have for contributing with a new license, it seems they have already made decisions about non-commercial licenses. So I don't think it worth the effort to try to change that.

I personally avoid the non-commercial licenses because they usually have a lot of ambiguity. Different countries and people could easily interpret it in very different ways. This ultimately leads to people avoiding to reuse/extend your work because of fear of violating the license.

Nevertheless, I do understand why some authors would prefer to release their work under NC and ND licenses, and I respect that decision. That's why I don't mind including them in this repo, although I don't see myself using them in the future.

[prnam]

.. and its not too far from now either that every country will start having policy, regulations and license templates on open-source contributions from their citizens and also coming up with own definition of non-commercial etc. as traditional dictionary reference makes no sense in current time. 🙂