Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Trust and merge [was: Mapping of license restrictions (CC - GFDL compatibility)]

cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: j lipszyc <jl AT creativecommons.pl>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Trust and merge [was: Mapping of license restrictions (CC - GFDL compatibility)]
  • Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 03:37:22 +0100

Hi all.
Last few days i spent on other activities, but this morning i have read entire thread once again. And now i found that Tomos also did it, added lots of insight, and gave us great summary. Thanks :-)
My insight will be not technical, but somewhat fundamental, and I will build it on Robs email. Since there are elements of pure fiction (and possibly pure-nonsense, please check it :-), and i'm not in a position of power (i'm a mere CC activist from Poland), treat it accordingly.

rob AT robmyers.org wrote:
It is not legally possible to produce a BY-SA that is FDL compatible. This is
due to the upgrade clause in BY-SA 2.x which means that FDL cross-licensing in
a newer BY-SA would apply to works placed under the older licenses that have
not given permission to be relicensed under non-CC licenses.

I don't understand that. I agree that changes we make in 3.0 would make also previously relased works GFDL compatible, but why you think this is not legally possible? If we can deal with invariant section of GFDL (and it seems we can) i dont think there is something legally wrong with it. I hope we can deal with all technical problems listed by Tomos as well. But there are other problems, and more on that later.

Let other licenses be made compatible with BY-SA.

You know this not likely to be done. Not even in predictable future. Why? Because some CC actions make certain people uncertain about CC long-terms goals and behaviour. BY-SA license automatically updates itself to latest version. FSF have to trust CC to allow this for GFDL works. Without FSF trust - no two-way compatibility.
As you probably know i strongly believe, that CC needs something similar to Debian Guidelines, some kind of social contract we can treat as our constitution while crafting future licenses versions. This may be a good starting point to gain FSF trust.
But it's not going to work one side only. There is nothing wrong for BY-SA users to make their work GFDL compatible right now. But future is different: we also have to trust FSF and believe, that any changes they make to GFDL in future will not hurt current BY-SA users. FSF do change their licenses. Such change as adding something similar to "invariant section" (that as you know that happened) may make CC users very unhappy.
So we need trust and sadly this is something we do not have. FSF removed all CC licenses from their lists. Lawrence still didn't answered questions about it (i understand he promised to do it in his series of emails, but this didn't happened yet).
There is something more: Richard Stallman doesn't think, that license compatibility is a freedom, too. Software is different than texts of culture, and he simply do not have to deal with our problems. If there is program under non-free license he writes another one. If there is something under free, but GPL non-compatible license, he puts it into other directory. This can't be done in culture. You cannot air a movie with somen shots kept in other directory.
So he don't believe that license comatibility is actually something we should fight for, and how we are going to convince him without mutual trust?
How this can be solved if we will work hard to gain mutual trust? I think there are two possible solutions. First is to have a written agreement about freedoms guaranteed by GFDL and CC BY-SA licenses. This could be a base for two-way comaptibility.
Even better will be license MERGE. If CC and FSF together will worded a license which will suit needs of current GFDL and BY-SA users and made it next version of both - that will be something really, really good.

> Imagine if the FSF had modified the GPL to allow GPL-ed work to be
> taken and put under similar licenses that people wrote. This would not have reduced
> fragmentation either (unless Apache had acted as a Black Hole for the GPL as I
> guess Wikipedia would for BY-SA).

AFAIK without "invariant section" GFDL world is free (even if not perfect) so there is nothing wrong with it. I do not really care what license name is as long as it preserves freedoms i want my users to have. There is nothing wrong for CC to actively promote some other licenses than CC ones. Do we care about brand or freedom? If it's brand - hell, better no for all of us.

greetings
Jaroslaw Lipszyc




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page