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CC BY-ND (Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives) is a fairly restrictive license. It does not allow derivative works.

The Wikipedia article on Creative Commons licenses says that it is not a free/libre license:

Description                    Acronym    Free/Libre
====================================================
Attribution + NoDerivatives    BY-ND      No

However, the Free Software Foundation does include it on their list of Free "Licenses for Works stating a Viewpoint (e.g., Opinion or Testimony)". In fact, they use it themselves.

This is the license used throughout the GNU and FSF web sites. This license provides much the same permissions as our verbatim copying license, but it's much more detailed. We particularly recommend it for audio and/or video works of opinion.

The full list of licenses on the OSI site does not mention any Creative Commons license, though the site itself is licensed under CC BY.

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3 Answers 3

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No, CC-BY-ND isn't Open Source. It violates rule 3 of the Open Source Definition:

  1. Derived Works

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

It also violates the freedom 3 of the Free Software Definition:

The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3)

The FSF doesn't list it as free license. The link you provide not only has free licenses, it has sections for free (compatible with GPL), free (incompatible with GPL) and nonfree licenses. For instance is the Sun Community Source license listed in the unfree section. CC-BY-ND is listed in their nonfree documentation license section.

They list it again though, in their section for Viewpoints. The FSF claims that these opinions should be copied unchanged. The sections starts the following:

Licenses for Works stating a Viewpoint (e.g., Opinion or Testimony)

Works that express someone's opinion—memoirs, editorials, and so on—serve a fundamentally different purpose than works for practical use like software and documentation. Because of this, we expect them to provide recipients with a different set of permissions: just the permission to copy and distribute the work verbatim. Richard Stallman discusses this frequently in his speeches.

That means the license is nonfree, but useful for a different purpose.

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    Also, just to add, the content of the sites may not be "open sourced" for a few reasons... :)
    – Zizouz212
    Jun 25, 2015 at 12:47
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The CC BY-ND is not compatible with either the OSI's Open Source definition or the FSF's Free Software Definition.

That said, the FSF still considers it to have an appropriate use that is compatible with their movement: to licence opinions and testimonies. The licence shouldn't be used for documentation or project assets, but they do consider it to be appropriate for works which represent the thoughts of a single person and which it would be misleading to change. To quote Richard Stallman:

The second class of work is works whose purpose is to say what certain people think. Talking about those people is their purpose. This includes, say, memoirs, essays of opinion, scientific papers, offers to buy and sell, catalogues of goods for sale. The whole point of those works is that they tell you what somebody thinks or what somebody saw or what somebody believes. To modify them is to misrepresent the authors; so modifying these works is not a socially useful activity. And so verbatim copying is the only thing that people really need to be allowed to do.

This is contentious and I doubt there's any agreement over it. I can see the merit of the argument, but I also think there's more reuse value than verbatim copying - it rules out translations for example, and sometimes quoting an excerpt is more appropriate than reproducing an entire work.

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    Even if it doesn't, it can't take away rights you already have, such as Fair Use.
    – TRiG
    Jun 25, 2015 at 13:21
  • @TRiG yeah quoting is always allowed, but fair use quoting has limits. I'd be interested to find out if BY-ND allows you to use a work in between the limits of 100% and the ~10% or whatever that is "fair use".
    – curiousdannii
    Jun 25, 2015 at 13:23
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The FSF lists the CC BY-ND license under a different category: Licenses for Works stating a Viewpoint (e.g., Opinion or Testimony)

The introduction says (bold emphasis mine):

Because of this, we expect them to provide recipients with a different set of permissions: just the permission to copy and distribute the work verbatim.

So it’s not a license that conforms to The Free Software Definition, as "freedom 3" is missing: "The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others"

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