Xenharmonic Wiki talk:License
For reference, although this page was just created, this has always been the license that the Xenharmonic Wiki materials have been distributed under, going back to when the site was hosted at Wikispaces. The license was also listed at our Archive.org Xenharmonic Wiki Backups page, so this page is just to make it easier to locate.
concern about NC being non-free and incompatible
I see that back in 2018, the non-free NC restrictive license was chosen. I'm concerned about problems with this restriction, and it's incompatible with the CC-BY-SA license used by almost all other wikis including Wikipedia and the Xenrhythm wiki. I personally also use CC-BY-SA for all my own music and writings, so the NC license makes me hesitant to contribute here.
NC incompatibility
Because NC is non-free (see https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/freeworks), it is incompatible with the standard free-culture licenses, CC-BY and CC-BY-SA. Because of the NC restriction, no material can ever be mixed between Wikipedia and the XenWiki.
To reiterate: in a situation where people want to combine material from Wikipedia and XenWiki, there is no commercial activity happening, but the NC license is still blocking this creative process. Surely that's not intended.
To clarify again, as this is often misunderstood: if some work says "no commercial use", it cannot be legally used within another work that does allow commercial use, and this is true even when no commercial use ever occurs.
Why NC? Is there any actual concern it addresses?
Is there any actual problem around the XenWiki and commercial use? Who would be using XenWiki material commercially? And wouldn't it be welcome, even encouraged, for the work to be used in such rare cases as long as the commercial use itself was still licensed freely? (That's what the SA "share-alike" is for already, that alone blocks anyone from using the material in All Rights Reserved derivatives). Wouldn't CC-BY-SA address all the real concerns anyone has?
I suspect that NC was chosen just because of the general inclination that this work isn't intended for commercial use. I suspect nobody considered the compatibility issue or other ramifications of the license. Is that right?
Possible changes to allow CC-BY-SA
I think it would be worth the effort to build the consensus needed to change to the standard CC-BY-SA.
Maybe a practical way to transition is possible. Consider a case where everyone contacted accepts a change to CC-BY-SA. Then, any substantial material from those who could not be reached could be specifically marked with an indication that the specific page is NC licensed still. I hope this will not be needed. Overall, it would be a huge improvement to be compatible with the rest of the wiki world and not segregate this material.