Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

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

cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

List archive

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: [cc-licenses] NC considered harmful? Prove it...
  • Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 08:53:54 -0500 (EST)


> Greg says:
>
> "Well, it's based in part in an understanding of human psychology.
> Why do people contribute to a Free project?
> The answer seems to reflect a notion that most people who contribute
> to Free projects don't want to contribute their time and energy to
> something that is restricted as much as CC-NC is."
>
> While Greg wasn't completely clear, he seemed to be arguing that other
> things being equal, people would contribute to projects under less
> restrictive licenses. GPL is a more restrictive license than BSD or
> Apache, and yet is vastly more popular, so I think Greg's contention
> (if I understand it correctly) is incorrect.

I said "as restricted as much as CC-NC".

There is a diffference between something like

(1) CC-NC, which does not allow the commons to do certain things
within the commons (the commons cannot do commercial use) and

(2) GNU-GPL, which allows the commons to do everything that a
competing project could do, and this is the important bit,
as long as it's done as part of the commons.

So, CC-NC does not allow some individual to take the common work
and do some commercial use with it. GNU-GPL does. GNU-GPL has an
advantage here.

CC-NC does not allow someone to create a derivative and take it
private. GNU-GPL does not either. GNU-GPL and CC-NC are equal here.

BSD allows someone to take a derivative private.
But this may or may NOT make BSD better than GNU-GPL.
BSD is certainly better than CC-NC because the project
can still do commercial work.

For GNU-GPL versus BSD, the choice comes down to whether you
think your project can handle competition against ITSELF.
If you allow forks to be taken private and those forks
can compete against the original project, is that goign to
be a problem? For a project that takes a long time to develop,
it might be a problem.

But that's a different issue, discussed in depth here:
http://www.greglondon.com/dtgd/html/draftingthegiftdomain.htm#8_Copyleft_or_Public_Domain_

The gist of it is that when comparing BSD versus GNU-GPL,
the answer to which license is better is "It depends on the project".
Whereas when comparing CC-NC to either BSD or GNU-GPL,
the Free licenses are always better than CC-NC for a
commons-based project (and all other things being equal).






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page