[cc-community] More discussion on NC
Rob Myers
rob at robmyers.org
Mon Oct 11 09:47:05 EDT 2010
On 10/11/2010 09:03 AM, Andres Guadamuz wrote:
>
> I can tell you as a user for both. H2g2.com was clumsy, it had the right
> idea but was badly implemented. I remember writing an entry on Hull
> (long story...), and then never coming back. Not once did I look at the
> h2g2 licence, and that was at the time when I was immersed in open
> source licensing and writing about the legalities of it. I simply didn't
> care. Probably I was typical.
You probably were typical, but by the time the content was being sold to
mobile phone companies the management were aware that a growing number
of people were unhappy. The company didn't last long enough for this to
come to a head but previous user revolts weren't handled very well at all.
> What sold me to wikipedia was not the licence, although I knew what the
> GFDL was. Wikipedia was fun and it was easy to edit. I don't think
> anyone I know ever cared about the licence. For example, I used
> Wikipedia in class, and I can say categorically that a tiny minority of
> my students were aware of the licence involved.
If only the development methodology of h2g2 had allowed the software to
be improved by the community. ;-)
(The designers and developers were good but a lot of development time
was basically lost on a port from Perl to a Microsoft platform ready for
that magical million users every dot.com was going to get rich from.)
> This is where we disagree. I don't think that NC is taking room from
> better licensing. Under many circumstances NC works, and people like
> having the choice (I know I do).
I support and promote CC and this includes NC whether I want it to or
not. We are not seeing the straight choice for free culture that we saw
with Free Software.
> If I didn't have the choice, then I'd draft my own NC licence.
I'm curious to know why?
- Rob.
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