Freedom.  Everyone should be free to use, modify, distribute, and customize to their own needs as long as they impose no further restrictions on anyone else.  No further restrictions than what allows you the freedom yourself.  Money (commercial use) has absolutely nothing to do with it,  it is about guaranteeing that your contribution remains as free as you originally intended.

There are some other advantages of freedom that, in my opinion, are rarely noticed.  When you free up the "code" (written word in our case), it spreads, it grows. Greater numbers of people take pride in of the material.  Greater numbers of people feel included.  The original "code" gains more value, and the value is spread around further.  No single contributor owns all of the "value".

Likewise, the opposite is true.  No single contributor bears the entire burden of liability.  Pragmatically speaking, the more people that contribute and the wider the work is distributed the safer you are from legal attack and a single point of failure.  Consider for example the linux kernel.  If major corporate investors has no interest or investment in the kernel, do you really think they would be spending 10's of millions to protect it?  If someone does attempt to steal the kernel, they could conceivably be exposed to 100's or 1000's of different legal actions from each and every developer who has copyrighted material in the kernel.  Consider the irony in parties from completely opposite ends of the spectrum, from IBM to the FSF, defending linux!  Freedom is a mighty sword if you look at it this way.

I believe that people who have never tasted the freedom of an OSI type license are unnerved by it.  The natural inclination for is to keep a tight grip on their work, to monetize it, to assert control over it, to protect it, to limit distribution to preserve "value".  In my experience this inclination comes from living in a world that is primarily motivated by money, and is pretty damned compelling.  But the issues that we are discussing, which is our "product", are not about money.

What has convinced me that the commercial CCL with attribution and the share-alike clause is groklaw.

The articles by PJ are CCL, but the articles by themselves are not what gives groklaw "value". The contributions of the community are.  Can PJ provide all of the eyewitness accounts?  Do all of the transcriptions?  Run the web site itself?  Pay for the hosting of the web site herself?  Moderate everyone by herself?  Run around to courthouses all over the country and pick up the documents?  Provide all of the "scoops" herself?  Comb the entire internet for interesting articles herself? I think not.  But it is exactly these contributions that give PJ the seed for her articles, her soapbox.

The current linking, distribution, and licensing policies of groklaw are far, far more restrictive than even the Microsoft web site.  Groklaw is the most restrictive web site I have _ever_ seen.  She will not allow the site to be spidered, linked to, or in any shape, form, or fashion be distributed elsewhere, with or without attribution.  Not only are these policies completely opposite of all that is sacred in the open source world, they are in complete opposition to the spirit embodied in the internet itself!  Imagine if every news group, web site, and forum was this restrictive!  You might own the copyright to your comments, but she retains a Draconian death grip on any distribution of your contributions, including on her own web site.  The entire body of contributions to groklaw have effectively been sent into a black hole as far as I am concerned.

Because of the importance of the issues (we are at ip-wars, gearing up for the patent wars) involved, I would like ip-wars to be the complete opposite.  Allow the site to be spidered, syndicated, deep-linked, quoted, and distributed as far and as wide as possible.  Invite people like Andy to come up with creative ways to make use of the information.  Invite others to mirror the entire damn site in case Jeff gets hit by a bus.  Invite others to duplicate the site entirely because they don't like us or what we are saying.  Bring it on!