Did you miss the "as little burden on their consciousness as possible" part?

You know, I heard that excuse a lot twenty years ago.

That's what they said twenty years after Gutenberg invented the movable type. Of course the printing press was perfect by then, there wasn't any possibility for improvement, technology hasn't advanced at all since, and books were as easy to handle then as they're now. So there's no excuse for anybody that didn't know how to read, and they should be blamed for not taking advantage of that brand new technology.

Or maybe computing technology is primitive and hard to use, and it requires years of professional training to understand?

(...I wonder where the impression that nerds are arrogant comes from?)

Only if the price to entry is low. If it's high, the unregulated market itself would prevent competition

So you're suggesting that tablet computers are not for serious computing? Outrageous! So, maybe we should relegate them to be used for, say, amateur usage by non-experts?

GPL or CC-BY-SA content is not safe from DMCA takedown notices either. I don't see how that's relevant.

The license still.grants pretty much absolute control to the rights holder

How come? The rights holder can't control non-commercial use after he has released it. So it's "open for non-commercial use".

There is not *one* definition of open and free, the BSD-GPL license wars prove it. Sure -NC is less open than those, but it isn't necessarily closed either.

They "steal" votes from the candidate that is near to their interests making the other win.

That assumes there's a major candidate that is near to their interests.

The fact remains that you will never be able to match the typing speed achieved on a keyboard, even with limited travel, when typing on a tablet's screen.

Most users I know use the "hunt and peck" technique and are unable to touch-type, so they will never be able to match the typing speed achieved on a keyboard, even with a physical keyboard. A tablet virtual keyboard thus proves no disadvantage to them.

Yes, it's legally equivalent to shareware and freeware; it's unclear whether it can be used for self-promotion where the content is not distributed for money, only for publicity; and it doesn't allow for building a corpus of open content like a fully open license would do.

However, CC-*-NC licenses allow for unlimited amateur work and redistribution, which is a step above what standard copyright allows even under free use terms. Given the "web 2.0" model of distributed content generation, that end-users can reuse the content without legal worries is a win toward freedom even if it doesn't go the extra mile and only some users can benefit from it.

Because freedom and openness are both incompatible with NC.

No, they aren't.

Seriously, I thought you should be able to defend the free/open principles with a less shallow argument than that. See my post below. Defending open content is not a binary proposition but more like a continuum; and CC-NC-SA falls inside that continuum nearer to "open" than "close".

It really depends on how you define freedom and openness. I'd say the CC-NC-SA is quite apt for the goals it promotes - that small content creators release their work to be shared and reused throughout the Internet "informal" channels.

That it doesn't offer full doesn't make it opposing open principles, it just offers a less permissive version of them; that's still promoting openness in my book. As you say, the GPL itself includes some restrictions, and even then it's held as the definition of "free and open" for many of us.

Heck, even the MIT license places restrictions on what you an do (you cannot use the names of the copyright holders, you have to copy the license notice in all versions, etc), and therefore is not "free as in freedom"; there are still things you aren't allowed to do with MIT-licensed content. So by your definition it would be "opposing free and/or open principles" too, because the content under it is not in the public domain.

How is releasing content under CC-NC-SA 3.0 license opposing free and/or open principles?

Point releases in Firefox did definitely include new functions on par or bigger than current "major" versions do. Firefox 3.5 included multimedia tags, private browsing, several new web technologies (workers, JSON)... Firefox 3.6 included the Personas interface and checking old plugins.

Firefox 16 is not 'mayor' in the same way that 3.0 or 4.0 were. The new numbering schema means that the version number does no longer provide significant information about the project evolution.

I think of it as version 4.16, and everything makes sense again.

When you are dead does it matter that you have known?

No, but it matters while we are still alive. That's the essence of everything we can think of.