Why is the course template licensed under a noncommercial license?

[EmanuelLoos]

The course template is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which prohibits commercial use. Unless there is a really good reason for it, I would really recommend against such licensing, especially regarding a template. The Free Software Foundation, the non-profit behind the GNU Licenses (GPL, LGPL, AGPL, GNU FDL) that had the idea of copyleft in the first place, recommends strongly against it, it is not a real copyleft but a non-free license, because it does not allow the work to be used and redistributed freely when prohibiting commercial use. It can become a huge impediment for free software and copyleft projects.

[EmanuelLoos]

@kantord

It would be great to know why you picked this license for the template, because this has legal implications (making an important part, the courses, of LibreLingo non-free and forcing everyone who uses the template to publish their work under the terms of the same non-free license as well), which can get ever more difficult as more and more people contribute, because changing the licence afterwards requires everyone who contributed to agree.

Prohibiting all commercial use of a course will make it impossible for commercial organisations to offer hosting for or even just use LibreLingo and therefore they will never have a reason to contribute. This can become a pitfall in the future. Non-commercial licenses are meant for commercial organisations to "open source" something without actually granting the user the four essential freedoms of free software so they can still charge commercial users fees because these are not allowed to actually use the "open source" software by the license. Such licenses are not meant to keep companies from doing bad things, they are meant for companies who do not actually want to grant the users the full freedoms but only part of them - making their software still non-free. But that does not seem to be your intention. If the goal is freedom of the user, while stopping corporations from selling modified non-free versions, a real copyleft license like CC-BY-SA would be the best choice, not a license made for corporations so they can charge fees from other commercial users.

Source:

CC’s NonCommercial (NC) licenses allow rights holders to maximize distribution while maintaining control of the commercialization of their works. If you want to reserve the right to commercialize your work, you may do this by choosing a license with the NC condition. If someone else wants to use your work commercially and you have applied an NC license to your work, they must first get your permission. As the rights holder, you may still sell your own work commercially.

I actually started creating a course based on the template and am now unable to publish it under the terms of a free copyleft license like CC-BY-SA.
So please, please do respond to this.

[EmanuelLoos]

@kantord @dimkard @cutthroat78 @szabgab

Would you please be so kind to consider relicensing your course template form CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 to CC-BY-SA-4.0 so that I can licence my course based on your template under CC-BY-SA-4.0 and publish it?

CC-BY-SA-4.0 is a strong copyleft license that requires everyone, who makes changes to the course and publishes it, to publish them under the same licence as well. The only difference is that a commercial organisation may use the course as well - while still required to grant the same freedoms to use, study, modify and share their changes to everyone as well.