CC0 is awful for code. I didn't understand why until reading this https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2012-February/001431.html (you can click the thread button to see the full thread as well).

• Many licenses like GPL and Apache explicitly say patent rights are waived and the patent holder can't sue the user.
• Many licenses like MIT are believed to implicitly do this because of the language used.
• CC0 specifically states that it does not give you patent usage.

https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.en#limitations

No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.

The only license/declaration approved by both the FSF and OSI for putting something into the public domain while having a permissive fallback license (for jurisdictions without public domain) is the Unlicense. If you know of others please let me know.

Why are you talking about Creative Commons?

Because (from the article):

Originally open-source under the General Public License, DuckStation‘s license was changed first to PolyFormStrict License and then to CC-BY-NC-ND. These changes prohibit commercial use and derivatives of the emulator, including packaging it for distribution.

Yeah. It's not supposed to be for code. Didn't stop the Duckstation developer.

There are plenty of options in licenses in the post-open source, copyfair, copyfarleft, & such that work for software that are not considered “free” or “open” (where open is more corporate than free, which free is obviously the better one) but still allow users to modify read & usually modify the source.

I would have to evaluate those licenses on a case by case basis, but I suspect I would find the vast majority of them okay enough. But again, this is moving the goalposts. I was expressing my concerns issues with the CC BY NC ND, but you have changed the discussion to be about other licenses. Although interesting, they are not relevant since the DuckStation license is not those.

I still think government funding for free software is the correct solution, however. I generally find all of the post open and whatnot licenses have restrictions can be problematic, or loopholes that can be abused to get out of the "good" restrictions. I noted a while ago with one of the licenses that demand that corporations making over some amount giving up a percentage of their profits, that Google used to do a scheme where Alphabet (parent company of google) was the actual owner of the google logo, and then they rented it to Google at an absurdly high price, in order to artificially lower Google's profits. I think that it would be too simple for the extremely wealthy companies to do something similar and use post-open licensed software without consequence.

Taxing corporations is hard, but having every individual entity behind a software try to extract resources from a corporation will be harder. "Divide and conquer". My understanding is that license violations are a Civil case, meaning you have to spend money on lawyers and other legal things and... you would be going against some of the richest entities in the world in a court where money is basically a win button.

And of course, allowing society to continue to rely on proper Free Software licenses, ensures software freedom is preserved.

usually modify the source.

No. If I cannot modify the source, then I don't really view a difference between it and proprietary software. Both the OSI and Free Software Foundation at least require the ability to modify the source code, in order for a license to actually count at FOSS under their guidelines — and I agree with them. Code I cannot modify, is a piece of my computer I do not own.