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cc-licenses - Re: keeping CC-SA free

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>
  • To: "Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts" <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: keeping CC-SA free
  • Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 15:45:49 -0400 (EDT)


Wouter Vanden Hove said:
> There are license incompatibilities between all strong copyleft licenses.
> It's a good idea to be at least thinking about solving this problem.

Solve the problem, yes, but don't kill Copyleft/ShareAlike while
doing it. The purpose of Copyleft is clear: to enable a large group
of people to develop a work over time in the presence of market driven
forces.

EduOnly and NonCommercialOnly and similar restrictions on a
ShareAlike license would defeat the point of having ShareAlike
in teh first place.

You want to be able to give the work away to as many people
as possible without ever having ot worry about someone taking
the work private and using market forces to compete against
you and the very project you create.

That's the only restriction of Copyleft.

If you add NonCommercialOnly, then you kill Copyleft.

The CreativeCommons mantra appears to be
"the author giving up some rights is better than
the author giving up no rights."

But this totally misses the point of Copyleft.
Copyleft is PublicDomain except in that it witholds
enough rights to survive long term along side
market competition.

Saying "ShareAlike-NonCommercial" is better than
"All rights reserved" is missing the strength of
Copyleft.

Linux developed and survived over 20 years
alongside Microsoft because Copyleft gave
the code to everyone and it prohibited the
likes of Microsoft from taking it private,
extending it, and competing against the
original Linux.

but linux would not be where it is today
if it weren't for commercial help from
RedHat and non-university contributions
from around the world.






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