[cc-community] Benjamin Mako Hill on Creative Commons
Mark Havenner
laveaux at poorteacher.com
Mon Aug 1 16:34:49 EDT 2005
ROFL
Thank you Greg. This actually makes sense to me now and it seems my opinions
and assumptions are sound enough to be somewhat stable.
On 8/1/05 1:57 PM, "Greg London" <email at greglondon.com> wrote:
>
>> Before last week I had no idea there was a difference
>> between 'open' content and 'free' content and am still
>> struggling to ascertain exactly what the real difference
>> is between GFDL and the Attribution-ShareAlike, save that
>> the source code is required on GFDL and a certain
>> transparency in work that is not really applicable on
>> creative projects.
>
> There isn't much differnce but the labeling.
> both open and free are terms used to describe
> gift economy licenses. "Free" was a term used
> by Stallman, with all of its political conotations.
> There was a "manifesto" written that even talked
> about "free as in free speach, not free beer"
> and other such stuff. Basically, free software
> became more and more combative towards proprietary
> works at least in the "rhetoric".
>
> The "open" source movement was started, in part,
> to distance itself from the soapboxing that was
> happening around the "free" software movement,
> but to keep "gift economy" licenses alive.
> Actually, "open source" was adopted in part for
> teh specific reason that proprietary vendors
> would be more likely to use "open source" software
> than "free software", simply because "free"
> wasn't something that you could easily convince
> a businessman to adopt.
>
> Both terms describe the same licenses, just
> with different rhetoric around it to explain it.
>
> In fact, the acronym "FLOSS" is short for
> "Free Libre Open Source Software".
> There are some variations that may or may not
> include teh "Libre" part or the "software"
> part, but basically, the acronym attempts
> to capture all teh different rhetorical terms
> that mean the same thing into one word.
>
> As for specific licenses, some people are
> adamantly in favor of some types of FLOSS
> licenses while adamantly against others.
>
> Copyleft licenses are actually the most restrictive
> of teh FLOSS licenses. Other licenses such as the
> BSD license are one step away from putting the
> work in the public domain, and therefore have almost
> no restrictions.
>
> Within the various copyleft licenses,
> GNU licenses require source and CC licenses do not.
>
> Pretty much, I think that anything more restrictive
> than GNU-GPL is considered to be a non-free license.
>
> CC-NC is not FLOSS
> same goes for ND, Sampling, and sometimes BY.
>
> You don't have to require source to be free.
>
> On the other hand, some attribution requirements
> are considered to be not-free. Whether "attribution"
> as a whole is free or not is subject for debate.
> I don't know if the CC-BY license has been certified
> by the open source initiative as meeting the open source
> definition.
>
> If you're confused, that means you have probably
> been paying attention.
>
> Greg
--
Mark Havenner
Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup,
They slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe
- The Beatles
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