[cc-licenses] NC considered harmful? Prove it...

drew Roberts zotz at 100jamz.com
Wed Mar 7 21:52:12 EST 2007


On Wednesday 07 March 2007 09:39 pm, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 3/7/07, Terry Hancock <hancock at anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,

> >
> > Now I want to prove it. You know, with *evidence*. ;-)
> >
> > No facile "well it's not 'free' so it's not in the 'commons'" word
> > games. I need actual empirical evidence that NC (including NC-SA) works
> > do not get reused, improved, disseminated, etc. as efficiently as By or
> > By-SA works do.
>
> [Sorry, this is too short, deserves a lot more, but I'm busy ATM :/
>
>There are some variants of open source software
> licenses with NC terms, but they aren't popular. 

Huh? You have lost me there. Can you explain and give examples? Isn't this 
impossible by definition?

> I disagree with Greg's suggestion that this is psychological; if
> people didn't want to contribute under restrictive licenses then the
> BSD and Apache licenses would be much more commong than they currently
> are. They aren't, so we have to look for non-psychological reasons.

I am not sure I follow this line of thinking. Can you explain this as well? 
(No pressure.)
>
> I might add that I think that share-alike licenses are generally more
> successful than more permissive licenses (compare BSD and the various
> proprietary BSD forks vs. Linux) because they solve the prisoner's
> dilemma and guarantee that all players always cooperate instead of
> defect. (I think this particular thought is worth a whole thesis from
> someone with a game theory or organization theory background.)

Well, I am sure Greg will be happy to discuss the game theory take on this. 
(If I read him right.)
>
> Hope those thoughts help- sorry that they aren't as organized/clear as I'd
> like-
>
> Luis

all the best,

drew
-- 
(da idea man)



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