I notice that the "How do I make an open-source licence that forbids commercial activity" question came up again, as it does from time to time:
- Open source license for limited use
- Links to authoritative discussion of why not to add non-commercial clauses to otherwise free/open licenses?
- Copyleft license that explicitly disallows monetisation
- Is Geogebra's "non-commercial only GPL3" license valid? (to a lesser extent)
- Open-source license to prevent commercial use?
One fairly-common solution to recurrent questions on the SE network is the idea of the list of canonical questions, being those questions that naturally get asked again and again. Instead of writing a new answer each time, or just closing each new question as duplicates of whichever previous example comes quickest out of a cursory site search, the idea of the canonical question is that the community tries hard to make the answer(s) on it as complete, up-to-date, and well-written as possible, and all repeats of the question are closed as duplicates of the canonical one. This serves a double purpose: it makes selecting the duplicate a quicker and easier process, and ensures that the asker of the new question gets pointed to the best set of answers available on-site.
The list of canonical questions is usually maintained as a meta question/answer, with proposals for new inclusions being added as answers to that question, or as meta questions in their own right. In case this is still unclear, a quick perusal of ServerFault's canonical list may clarify the process.
Is it time for OS.SE to start developing such a list?
