> We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses made available by the Free Software Foundation or listed as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative.
That's because we treat software very differently from most other content subject to copyright.
As in this case, (reading the above threads) there's confusion as to the no commercial use clause extends to the content or the outcome of its processes. That is to say, NoCommercialUse for a book clearly means for derivative works. Nobody would ever suggest you can't read a book while in a commercial establishment. But in software we routinely place use restrictions on the end-user. Kind of bizarre, when you think about it.
I completely agree with your first sentence. But I think your interpretation of NonCommercial is a bit off. NonCommercial in the context of a book does not refer to "using" the book or to creating derivatives. You don't need a license to read a book. Rather, it refers to copying the book. They have a separate clause that refers to creating derivative works from the book. If you have a CC-BY-NC book, that means you're allowed to copy the book as much as you want as long as it's not for commercial purposes. If you have a CC-BY book, that means you can copy it as much as you want, even if it's for commercial purposes. If you have CC-BY-ND, that means even though you can copy the book as much as you want, even for commercial purposes, the author is not granting you the right to make derivatives.
Software is different because copying software is a necessary part of using it. So CC-BY-NC for software could quite reasonably be read to restrict its use in a commercial environment because you (notionally) need a license to make that copy from the internet to your hard drive, and from your hard drive to system RAM so that you can use it.
You're distinguishing more finely than I am between exact copies and modified copies. Fair enough. My use of "derivative" above is intended to encompass deriving copies from an original, with or without modification.
To the extent using software inherently means creating copies - so does reading. The image of the page is transferred to my retinas and encoded in the volatile storage of an organic neural network.
(I'm making the same distinction between exact and modified copies that the Creative Commons folks make...)
As to your second point... Ha! Fair enough. But IIRC case law has actually recognized that the copies created on a computer as you install and execute a program count as "copies" for the purpose of needing a license for an activity that would otherwise violate copyright. That is why EULAs are, to some extent, considered valid and enforceable. No such case has been made for your retinas encoding the light bouncing off a page and transferring that pattern to your neurons.
Weird choice of license.