[cc-community] NC For Software

Greg London email at greglondon.com
Fri Sep 8 09:43:38 EDT 2006


A non CreativeCommons solution would be to have
the folks who do abandonware to find a license
and declare it the "abandonware license".
Maybe the BSD license?

Then it would be clear when someone says they're
releasing abandonware, but the license is something
more restrictive. Hopefully that would point folks
in the right direction.

As for CC, the problem I see is that CC is a
"spectrum of rights" organization, and their
biggest customers (users of licenses) are
market economy folks, not gift economy folks.

People are using CC licenses to give away free
samples in hopes of being discovered and getting
that million dollar contract for their work.

If there were any "solution" in the CC space,
it would be to change "spectrum of rights" to
something a little more selective. There may
be a "spectrum" but there really is only
market economy licenses and gift economy licenses.

The problem I see is that saying "spectrum"
is saying that CC-SA is a different shade of
CC-NC-ND. It's on the same "spectrum", right?
Wrong.

If CC binned their licenses into
"these are for community projects"
and "these are for proprietary projects",
then maybe folks would stop kidding themselves
into thinking CC-NC-SA is a good license
for their community project.

Of course, that would mean that one bin would
have CC-SA, CC-BY, and CC-BY-SA, and the other
bin would have every other possible combination.
Which would mean all those CC-BY-NC-SA folks
out there would suddenly realize that they're
"community project" aint so community friendly.
But at this point, a spade is a spade, and we're
just putting the word "spade" on it.

Greg

> One thing I am noticing is that people are starting to use NC for
> software.
> There was an example of this at the iCommons summit where someone had
> released
> some abandoneware under NC. Thus defeating the point of abandonware, which
> is
> to encourage the ongoing availability of work that will not be developed
> further.
>
> More often though I'm seeing JavaScript and PHP scripts being released as
> NC.
> The CMS theme question on the license list just now is an example of this.
> The
> reasons for NC-ing scripts are worse than for NC-ing almost any other kind
> of
> software. Scripts are small, easily re-used and will return great value to
> the
> author if they are incorporated in derivative works that the author can
> re-use
> to make money. They may look more like text than other forms of code, but
> they
> are still software.
>
> Non-commercial, educational, etc. licenses for software lost out to
> actually
> free licenses years ago. It's just a little frustrating to see people
> mis-using
> an NC content license on software in this way.
>
> /rant.
>
> I suppose the thing I'd like to say to CC is please can you guys
> re-emphasise
> that the licenses are not for software. :-)
>
> - Rob.
>
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>


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Wikipedia and the Great Sneetches War
http://www.somerightsreserved.org

What happens when one editor prefers
Sneetches with stars on their bellies,
and another editor prefers no stars on thars.



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