[cc-community] by-nd for software

Greg London email at greglondon.com
Tue Oct 23 09:17:50 EDT 2007



> In practice, the mere letters 'GPL' are a red flag to commercial
> software vendors and they generally stay away from anything
> so labeled.

Er, what? Where did you get this information from?
Linux is used to host a large swath of websites
and it's GPL. Anecdotally, I do hardware design and
my group at work loves free tools, free compilers,
free source control, free editors.

Now, if you want to *sell* the company Free software,
then, yeah, you may have a problem. You'd probably
have to bundle the software with some kind of support
committment or something that is a value add.

And if selling is the priority, then again you
list one set of requirements but describe a
completely different set of behaviours.

> we are leaning towards a slightly re-worded
> (i.e., excluding the right to modify the source)
> BSD license. ... this is really only BSD license
> less the re-distribution of derivatives,

(double-take)

Wh... wh... what?

OK. You seriously need to consider that you are
failing to understand a possibly subtle but
extremely important aspect of what it means
to be a Free License.

BSD is practically a Public Domain license.
It places almost zero restrictions on the work
other than that copyright notices remain in place.
It not only allows derivatives, but it allows
anyone to make a derivative and place it under
a restrictive license such as All Rights Reserved.
If you release a work under BSD, Alice could modify
it, license it All Rights Reserved, and prohibit
*you* from distributing the derivative or even
using her modifications in your version.

You are talking about CC-ND, which is much, much
closer to All Rights Reserved and is WAY far, far
away from something like BSD.

There is no such thing as a  "BSD license with
the slightly reworded exception that derivatives
are not allowed". Bill Gates might as well come
out and say that Windows will be released under
a Public Domain license, with the small exceptions
that you can't copy, distribute, or modify the
work.

Those are the three rights covered under copyright,
by the way: copy, distribute, and modify.
BSD allows all three. GPL allows all three, but
requires that modified versions be licensed GPL too.

You say you want to allow copying and distibution,
but prohibit modifications. That is *exactly* what
the CC-NoDerivatives license does.

That you keep trying to say your requirements somehow
*almost* fit a Public Domain license while describing
something as restrictive as CC-NoDerivatives is a
bit of a connundrum.

So, once again, I'll ask the question and maybe
we can sort this out:

What exactly is  your application software?

If you're going to release it under some sort of
license that allows copying and distribution, then
keeping it a secret doesn't really make sense.

Greg


(something that the
> commercial software vendors are not likely to be interested in)
> we think they might accept it.
>
> niknot
>
> p.s. One of the primary reasons why we have opted for a
> "high-integrity" distribution model is that the source includes
> a high degree of application domain knowledge and could
> be harmed by interventions by otherwise competent
> programmers who lack the appropriate level of expertize in
> the application domain. I offer this as an explanation, not
> justification. With that, I will not discuss further *why* we
> have opted for a particular distribution model, since I
> believe it would be an inappropriate waste of the list
> bandwidth.
> _______________________________________________
> cc-community mailing list
> cc-community at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-community
>




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