Recently there have been a few discussions about licensing with Creative Commons and even some conflicts with None Commercial clauses in some existing materials and art works.
The main problem with NC is that it can be quite the pain in the arse to manage. imagine if you have a wikipedia source licensed under CC-BY-SA and then a source licensed same +NC, now you’ll have to get one of them re-licensed in order to merge the work and create effective derivatives.
Speaking of derivatives, imagine if some group of people creates an effective derivative of your work and your company now wants to use it for some reason. Now you have to do something to re-license it and if you used SA then those external people can’t really re-license it without NC anyway.
So, I was thinking about this recently, one of the ideas I had was a time limited NC term. We know why NC is placed on works, to protect the commercial interests of the work so creators can hope to make some money back from it. Well if we had works licensed as CC-BY-NC5-SA (NC applies for 5 years after initial publication). Although I suspect the legal wrangling with derivatives would be interesting.
Either we can protect the work for commercial use for a set period of time, or we can wait for the work to fall into the Public Domain in 150 years. I’d rather see works fall into the normal FOSS license (CC-BY-SA) sooner rather than in hundreds of years.
Thoughts?