That's not surprising. A tiny minority of modders have insisted on non-free. Non-free licenses were very rare. It's as if there was an unwritten rule that any non-free software is not desired here. As a community, we have cultivated a strong pro free software stance. Anything non-free was always generally frowned upon, no matter what the forum policy says.That being said, we haven't had any issues with the forum related to this, with its policy.
So the permission for non-free was simply very rarely used.
So, we are dominated by free mods here. Non-free is simply not desired by a large portion of our community. Which is good!
The strong stance on free software has helped this community grow tremendously, I cannot stress enough how important this has been for Minetest and our community. It's much easier to get started if you have the legal trouble right out of the way. It's much better when you can enter without fear of copyright lawyers going after you.
Let's imagine for a second what would have happened if a majority of modders would have insisted on non-free licenses (but licenses which were permissible under forum policy), and the minority would have let get them away with this. Things start to get ugly quickly when you try to fork a mod, or re-use portions of a non-free mod (even if permissible for your particular use case). It's likely that you now have to apply the non-free license to your own mod as well. The non-free licenses would just continue to spread like a cancer, causing fewer and fewer mods to be still free software. Newbies would have had to deal with restrictions they do (oddly) not face with Minetest alone. The fear of copyright lawyers returns. And we are not (much) better than Minecraft.
Also, a large portion of mods would have simply been off-limits to me, as I would have refused to take part in this. Things around here would also have been a lot less pleasant to me. It surely would have been very demotivating to me to see my own contributions drown in a sea of non-free.
Obviously, none of this has actually happened. Because we did care about freedom, we didn't just surrender them. And as a result, everyone is a winner. :-)
This reasoning is flawed. Just because MT is not commercial does not mean everyone else should be forced to not “act commercially” (whatever that means). Live and let live.NC (non-commercial) : I think this should be allowed, after all Minetest isn't commercial. This does have the side-effect of making lots of "fake-minecraft" (modified minetest) further illegal, if they charge for this content.
Note it is very easy to violate a CC *-NC license:
- YouTube monetizations (i.e. video ads)
- Even the tiniest hint of ads on a website
- Affiliate links
- Putting the data on a data storage drive, then selling that drive
- You do something whatever the court believes to be “commercial” (the license is ambigious)
- You're the Deutschlandfunk (a public radio broadcaster owned 100% by the state) in Germany
- I don't know, maybe even asking for donations. Might happen if you have a crazy judge.
For an user, CC *-NC sucks. It's not any better than full copyright. So it is simply irresponsible to treat CC *-NC as a viable license choice (alongside actually free licenses), or to even recommend it and to pretend there is absolutely nothing wrong with those licenses. IMO Creative Commons needs to get their act together and finally review their NC licenses or even drop them. The definition of “NonCommercial” has not been changed since 1.0!
Modified Minetest is off-topic here. The license of Minetest is LGPL. It is definitely NOT going to change to the worse, this is a clear no-go. I think every core dev will agree with me on that one.