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Comment by jaxbot | Hacker News Reader

CC-Non commercial is a disappointing license to find. The project is very cool otherwise.

I wonder how they arrived at Creative Commons' CC-BY-NC as the license. These licenses are not meant for code but for artwork, Creative Commons actually discourage the use of their licenses for code [1]. I recently noticed the same with the FastPhotoStyle code [2] by nvidia, so I'm wondering if there is something that draws their legal departments to this license?

[1]: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...

[2]: https://github.com/NVIDIA/FastPhotoStyle

If the dataset it was trained on is CC-BY-NC, I'm pretty sure the model also has to be CC-BY-NC. However I think this is not respected, or even considered by most people.

I'd go with limiting how competitors can use it as the main deciding factor.

<cynical thought>Note that two of the three team members are from Facebook...

I'd never thought of this. It is a very interesting idea.

Hmmm... I guess it's been selected that way because it'd covevr the model files and the datasets. It's not about the code as much as the datasets/models.

They want to be the only people who can sell this where the real money is: military and law enforcement.

discourage people that aren't just hobbyists messing around from using it?

yeah, that's what I came up with myself. But I thought a main point, if not the whole point of publishing code for these companies was to appeal to developer-types who are fond of real open source/science. And those should be able to tell the difference...

It's a bit like allowing your scientists to publish their research, but only in prohibitively expensive and thus exceedingly niche journals.

Have you tried contacting the author/copyright holder to find out whether you can negotiate a commercial licensing agreement for the software? I assume you're open to paying commercial licensing fees.

Cheaper than a patent.

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