A discussion of hybrid open source and proprietary licensing models.

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

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.