SoulTaker opened this issue on Apr 19, 2008 ยท 284 posts
ptrope posted Sun, 20 April 2008 at 2:12 PM
SoulTaker, you've got a very good point - it should be stated clearly up front whether a free item is licensed for commercial use, and if so, if that is a limited or unlimited license. Thanks for, at the very least, not making this about "how free is "free," an argument I'm sure we've seen more than enough of.
I've made free items under both licenses - generally, if it's a model of something for which others hold the copyrights, I'll state up front that it is for non-commercial use only, and I think that's something that anyone should do. It's also the responsibility of any content maker to do this whenever he or she uses the intellectual property of another as the basis for their own work. By the same token, there is a responsibility on the user's part to use common sense - if you've downloaded something that's clearly from Star Trek or some other known commercial property, don't express outrage when you "discover" that you can't use it in commercial works - for that matter, even if it doesn't say this, common sense should tell you to err on the side of caution and not use it so.
If someone has been misled by how R'osity allows the Details tab to be worded, or by unclear or even missing Read me files, than by all means, let's address the problems and get them fixed. If someone has made assumptions, however, then I think that's an issue of personal expectations that needs to be addressed on a personal level - in obvious cases, not everything needs to be spelled out, and complaining about it won't change that.