>I don't believe there is a single OSI or common license that makes it straightforward for an author to say "This has all the open source freedoms, except for commercial uses" and sell the exception.

That's true and I'll argue that's a feature not a bug.

It's also by design. The OSI specifically does not allow "for educational use only" and other types of usage discrimination. "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research."

IMO, this was one of the things that open source software licensing got right. Non-commercial licensing of open source is intuitively appealing and is also a great way to not get software adopted.

You're correct that CC, by contrast, does have an NC clause as an option. Even leaving aside philosophical points, I hold that this is a not a good license variant. Just about anything that isn't a trivial use has some commercial element to it. And what I might rationalize as non-commercial may well be different from what the copyright holder considers non-commercial.

It's probably telling that CC has been kicking around the NC problem for something like a decade at this point and AFAIK is no closer to putting a stake in the ground now than they were then.

See also: https://www.cnet.com/news/does-the-noncommercial-creative-co...