Why do you have to chose the "Attribution" option with the new CC 2.0 Licenses?

Rob Myers robmyers at mac.com
Mon Aug 16 04:22:55 EDT 2004


On Sunday, August 15, 2004, at 10:04PM, <toddd at mypse.goracer.de> wrote:

>I did not find good arguments against making attribution standart in those mails...

Attribution is a requirement that you must comply with before you can use the work. The work isn't "Free", you're paying for it with attribution. This was a sticking point with the first BSD license, the "obnoxious advertising clause" as the FSF put it. 

I believe that people misunderstood the differences between attribution and nonattribution in 1.0: I think that even if you chose nonattribution you still got your name mentioned in the copyrights as part of the licensing (is that right?).

>I want to supply authorship information. I just don't care wether ppl give me
>attribution or not.

You can give permission to waive along with the copyright/licensing block as suggested in one of the postings.

>So why do you have so many licenses at all? 
>by-nc-nd and by-nc-sa would be enough. People could just waive whatever they
>don't want. Just 2 licenses, doesn't that sound good?
>Or is it that all the waiving makes things more complicated?

See the BSD/GPL conflict. People just like different things. CC are providing a good range of licenses that will satisfy most people whilst remaining conceptually compatible. I personally think all licenses should be GPL-like. This wouldn't be a popular position for CC. :-)

- Rob.



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