Recently I’ve come across several different programs on Github that are licensed under one of the Creative Commons noncommercial licenses and even after reading several articles on Wikipedia and Creative Commons Wiki and several threads here on Stack Exchange I still don’t fully understand what I can’t or cannot do with such a software.
I’ll start with a hypothetical scenario. Assume a text editor licensed under one of the noncommercial CC licenses. Am I allowed by its license to
- use such editor to do commercial work as an employee of for profit organization (e. g. create commercial software artifacts)?
- use such editor at home to create a work with the explicit intent to sell such work (e. g. write short story and try to sell it to newspapers/magazines)?
- use such editor at home to create a work, that might be exchangeable for monetary compensation in the future (e. g. write a short story for the fun of it with no intention of selling it now but keeping the doors open for commercial possibilities in the future)?
Does the answer to any of the preceding questions change with generative art software? To make it more concrete and specific I have found a name-generating software licensed under CC-BY-NC that takes a list of name as input and produces a list of similar sounding names as output. If I use my own lists of names as input, can I use outputted names in the use cases mentioned above?
Based on the reading I've done so far, I'd guess that all aforementioned uses are allowed by the license but I'm not really sure about that.
As a side note, I’m aware of the fact that the practice of licensing a source code under one of the Creative Commons license is discouraged but regardless I have to respect the license chosen by the copyright holder. I’m also aware of the fact, that noncommercial licenses are not considered free and as such are probably off-topic here but I’ve read several historical threads discussing this very subject on this site so I hope it’s OK to ask.