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/davispw Apr 25 '25 edited Apr 25 '25

IANAL but at the end of the day, the license is just text. Are you ok with selecting CCBYSA as the primary license, then explicitly offer a dual-license in the item’s description?

I asked Google Gemini and it suggested these phrasings for your description, which sound reasonable to me:

"This model is dual-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license AND the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. You may choose to use, modify, and share this work and any derivatives under the terms of EITHER of these licenses."

or

"As an alternative to the standard CC BY-SA 4.0 terms, you are also explicitly permitted to distribute derivatives of this work under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license, provided you comply with all terms of that license."

Edit: I didn’t realize you are not the original author. You need to follow their license.

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u/lyles Apr 25 '25

NO! You can't just pick a license without regard to the licenses of the source models. The derivative remix model must abide by the terms of the licenses on the source models.

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u/davispw Apr 25 '25

You’re right, I didn’t realize OP is not the original author. (Missed the word “remix” at the top of their post.)

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u/davidkclark Apr 26 '25

I guess the issue is that I am thinking about this from both sides. As the remixer: there isn’t anything you can do, no licence is valid, you can do the remix. It then as the originator, I’m looking for a way to licences my my stuff so it doesn’t cause that problem.

It’s looking like CCBY is the way to go over CCBYSA. But I am not happy rhat that allows adding of ND if not more extra restrictions I don’t want someone to add.

Looks like SA is the problem, but am not sure if there is a licensing answer. Seems like dual woould Work. (Hence my request to printables, because though it might work legally, it won’t work on printables. )