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cc-bizcom - Re: [Cc-bizcom] An important initial question for everybody

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Subject: A discussion of hybrid open source and proprietary licensing models.

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  • From: Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>
  • To: cc-bizcom AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-bizcom] An important initial question for everybody
  • Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 20:58:23 +0100

On 20 Aug 2004, at 20:45, Mike Linksvayer wrote:

I think two distinct ideas are being confused:

- A license with (more or less) variables and conditionals which can be used to generate actual licenses. The existing CC licenses may appear to be generated in this fashion, but my understanding is that they are not. CC doesn't generate custom licenses, it provides a limited set of stock licenses.

- Use of CC's coarse-grained license metadata to describe non-CC licenses (NB we already do for GPL _and_ LGPL, and Wikipedia has been publishing CC-style metadata for GFDL in its page metadata for a few months).

Heya Mike.

Yes, to clarify what I'm saying here:

1. The GPL and BSD already exist. Reproducing them under a different name doesn't seem useful.
2. A clean, parameterised format is what CC's "Human readable" pages and machine-readable metadata provide.
3. It might therefore be good to add BSD alongside the existing GPL entry in CC. I didn't realise LGPL was in there already, cool.
4. This would have all the advantages of allowing paramaterised choice and providing clear explanation without the disadvantage of re-inventing the wheel.

To an extent this is the motivation for copyleft, but rather than prohibiting commercial use, it requires the code be kept open. A simple "you can't sell the software" requirement seems really primitive in comparison to copyleft.

Yes.

I posted on cc-community (I think) about the "NC Fallacy": the idea that NC has more anti-capitalist (or whatever) effect than SA is naive. NC means you as a producer or user pay to distribute and use the content. SA means that you can lever proprietary content into the commons.

IIRC there *was* a backlash on h2g2,com when that dot.com started trying to sell content people had contributed but that was a licensing and education issue on a pre-CC, pre-Wiki project. People are used to the Open Source model now (or so I thought).

- Rob.





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