Creative Commons produce a family of related licenses. Most of these are Open licenses (not recommended for software) and are clearly on topic. A couple are not Open, but are very closely related to the Open licenses. Are these non-Open licenses on topic here, because they are members of a family of licenses, most of which are Open?
- CC0: Dedicates to public domain, with a permissive fallback license where that is impossible. The only CC license recommended for software. Free & Open. On topic.
- CC BY (Attribution): Attribution required. Free & Open. On topic.
- CC BY-SA (Attribution, Share Alike): Attribution required. Copyleft. Free & Open. On topic.
- CC BY-ND (Attribution, No Derivatives): Attribution required. No derivative works. Neither Free nor Open, but approved of by the FSF for works of opinion.
- CC BY-NC (Attribution, Non-Commercial): Attribution required. No commercial use. This counts as "discrimination against a field of endevour" and makes this a non-Free and non-Open license.
- CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike): Neither Free nor Open.
- CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives): Neither Free nor Open.
The NC and ND licenses are off topic by the strict definition, but they are very closely related to a whole suite of on-topic and widely used licenses. Should the Creative Commons NC and ND licenses be on topic here?
I previously argued in an Area 51 discussion that they should be. I'm less convinced of that now, but I do think this is a point which should be covered.