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A real decision, worked the way CommonForge teaches: read the licence before you build, and know which credit is a legal duty. You decide; the consequence is realistic; then reflect.
A case · you decide
Help Amina build on the commons — legally
Amina — a 17-year-old building a free tool for her community on public science data
The idea in play: reading a licence before you build — what you may use, and what you must credit.
Amina is building a web tool that shows local water-quality data in plain language. She wants to build on existing open resources — but each one comes with a licence, and she plans to add a small paid “pro” tier later to keep the servers running.
She found a great prediction model that does exactly what she needs. Its licence says CC BY-NC.
She also used a public dataset released as CC0 and another released as CC BY 4.0, and now she’s writing up her sources.
The model she wants to build on is licensed CC BY-NC. She plans a paid pro tier. Can she build the paid feature on this model?
The NC clause forbids commercial use, full stop — reading the licence BEFORE building saves a costly rewrite later.
She’s publishing her write-up. One dataset was CC0, another CC BY 4.0. Which source LEGALLY requires attribution?
CC0 waives attribution; CC BY requires it. Knowing which credit is a legal duty (vs a courtesy) is part of reading the commons.
Amina keeps the NC model for the free tier, swaps to a CC-BY model for anything she’ll charge for, and credits every source. Her tool ships on the commons — and stays on the right side of the licences that make the commons possible.