The Creative Commons movement, spearheaded by Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig in 2003, advocates a public repository for code that can be used, modified and re-used, provided it is not deployed commercially.
This would allow developers to engage their creative sides without the burden of narrowing their vision to what would make money, advocates argue, saying that existing and emerging technology sparks creativity.
"When the power of creativity has been granted to a much wider range of creators because of a change in technology the law of yesterday no longer makes sense," Lessig wrote.
Opponents of the Creative Commons License, which is an opt-in designation, say that the license’s prohibition of commercial uses is needlessly limiting.
“A noncommercial site could distribute a million copies of something and that's okay, but a small commercial site cannot deliver two copies if it's for commercial purposes,” wrote John Dvorak in PC Magazine. “What is this telling me?”
The Open Source community’s standard license is known as the General Public License, which allows portions of code or discreet sections to be used in conjunction with other code for commercial purposes.