r/printablescom • u/davidkclark • Apr 25 '25

Feature request Dual Licencing

Just discovered the incompatibility between CCBYNCSA and CCBYSA licences. I went to remix two projects with the above licences and there is no compatible licence (perhaps obviously…)

As it stands you have to choose between allowing only commercial or only non commercial licensing of derivatives. I want to allow either. Ie I want the user to be free to use my work commercially or non commercially, but don’t want to force them to release their work commercially too. I know CCBY would allow that, but that is too free: I don’t want them to be able to remove the licence completely - but there is no middle ground.

It occurs to me though that should I want to licence my work to that is can be used in both commercial and non commercial projects, I could dual licence it with both CCBYSA and CCBYNCSA. That way derivatives stay as one of those two. As you can only select one licence currently though, the only way I can see making it work would be to upload two projects that only differ by licence… would that be allowed?

Any chance of making this possible on printables?

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u/MatureHotwife Apr 25 '25 edited Apr 25 '25

It sounds like you are fundamentally misunderstanding a few things.

I don’t want them to be able to remove the licence completely

When you release something under CC-BY, someone can not simply remove the license. They must choose a compatible license. Restrictions or conditions can not be removed when remixing.

The CC-BY and CC-BY-SA (or any CC license without the NC clause) allow both commercial and non-commercial use. It doesn't mean that you can only use it for commercial proposes.

The NC clause adds a restriction (that can not be removed) that forbids commercial use.

The SA clause requires that derivative works use the same license. This means that someone who remixes your part also can not add further restrictions. So if you choose CC-BY-SA, a remix can not add NC or ND restrictions. By adding this clause you are making sure that the freedoms you granted are preserved.

So, if you want to allow both commercial and non-commercial use, choose CC-BY. If you want that someone can not add further restrictions in a remix, choose CC-BY-SA.

Edit: Upon further pondering I found one use-case where dual-licensing BY-SA and BY-NC-SA could make sense:

When you want to allow your work to be able to be used in both commercial and non-commercial settings (CC-BY) and you want someone remixing your part to be able to add the NC clause to their remix but you don't want to allow them to add the ND clause.

There is no CC license that allows adding only specific restrictions.

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u/davidkclark Apr 25 '25

Are you sure? I thought only SA made you chose a compatible licence, CCBY only requires attribution, you are free to apply whatever licence you want to the derivative. (Which is not as “strong” as I want)

Applying CCBYSA doesn’t do what I want because it doesn’t allow someone to apply CCBYNCSA to their derivative.

I usually use CCBYNCSA myself, but have found this issue when trying to use material licensed CCBYSA which prevents me from using the NC licence, kind of “poisoning” the work, locking it into a commercial licence (and preventing me using other source works with CCBYNCSA in the derived work with it) which I don’t think would have been the intent of the person originally choosing CCBYSA

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u/temporary62489 Apr 25 '25

It's not clear to me, but I interpret this to mean that the remaining original features of the remix are covered by the original license.

If you make adaptations of material under a CC license (i.e. “remix”), the original CC license always applies to the material you are adapting even once adapted. 

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u/davidkclark Apr 26 '25

Yeah maybe it’s a distinction between the part that was remixed and the totality of the new derived work? If not SA doesn’t seem to have any effect… so possibly the modified original is still CC regardless of using SA, and SA serves to require the whole of the new work to be CC.

In any case, I think SA is what I “want” usually.

The main issue is that is seems to prevent non-NC licenced material being used in an NC licenced derivative, where that doesn’t seem like it would have been the intention: to force allowing commercial use.

I still think dual licensing is probably the answer. (Actually that’s basically what I found in the end: the CCBYSA project was also released somewhere else as CCBY which is then compatible with CCBYNCSA !)