[cc-community] FYI: comment by Eric S Raymond on CC
Mike Linksvayer
ml at creativecommons.org
Wed Feb 13 03:23:07 EST 2008
On 2/13/08, Burobjorn <burobjorn at gmail.com> quotes ESR:
> "Raymond: A noble effort. I think there's a serious flaw in some of
> their licenses, though, in that they rely on being able to make a
> bright-line distinction between "commercial activity" and
> "non-commercial activity." In fact, at least under U.S. and British law,
> there's no reliable way to do that; you run into edge cases like
> fundraising activity by non-profit organizations.
Fine, not a new critique, but only applicable to NC licenses, and most
cases are not edge cases. But that's not what I'm here for...
> That's why the OSD
> doesn't depend on making any such distinction -- it's too easy to end up
> with either exploitable loopholes for non-cooperating commercial
> entities or nasty legal risks for nonprofits."
Stunning! So the Open Source Definition would be ok with licenses that
discriminate against users or fields if it were possible to do so in a
reliable way? Surely there are users or fields that can be
discriminated against reliably. Bring on the new "open source"
licenses!
> See for the article about 10 years of the Open Source Institute (OSI):
> http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2008/02/12/a-look-back-at-10-years-of-osi.html
All in good clean fun,
Mike
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