This license is incredibly vague, for example would it be a violation to use NC licensed code in your personal website with a few Google Ads on it that earns a few pennies a day? What about for another personal website/blog that earns hundreds of dollars a week?
As someone commented above, commercial use is an issue. Creative commons is good, but the non-commercial clause prevents it being useful in this case. It seems to be that the crucial issue here is the duplication of the project by forking.
I am unclear of where the boundaries could and should be, but in essence we want money to flow into community source projects. Corporations and commercial entities can and should pay a fair amount. If they don't want to pay, they should not be able to profit from the work of the community.
> the non-commercial clause prevents it being useful in this case. [...] Corporations and commercial entities can and should pay a fair amount.
There is nothing preventing the project owner from also granting individual paid commercial licenses. There are a number of GPLv3 (or other restrictive license) projects with a note like "contact us for commercial licenses" in the README.
Licenses aren't exclusive by default. If a company doesn't like the existing license, they are always free to contact the project owner(s) to request a custom license.
> There is nothing preventing the project owner from also granting individual paid commercial licenses.
Be careful. Changing the license presumably requires the consent of every copyright holder. It's trivial when it's just you but quickly become impossible in practice as the number of contributors increases. Stuff like this is why some projects ask you to reassign your copyright to them.
The corporations aren't going to pay anyway, they will just rewrite your code or something better from scratch and use their marketing money to beat you in the developer mindshare stakes.
Yes! Another vote for CC-BY-NC-SA! I release my code under this license as well, even snippets I post on my (tiny) blog.
I think this is what a lot of people would use if it were more known about. I feel like a lot of people do not actually read what a license provides and just default to MIT because it is widely used.
It exists: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/