Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Per I. Mathisen" <per AT leftist.net>]

On Fri, 6 Feb 2004 email AT greglondon.com wrote:
> I was actually surprised that Creative Commons had
> a No-Commercial use option on their license selection.
...
> If Creative Commons wants to cultivate a rich body of works
> that people can pool from, it should seriously consider
> reducing the options to two licenses:
>
> CC-BY-SA : attribution sharealike
> CC-BY-ND-NC : noderiviative noncommercial

I agree, although I wouldn't drop CC-BY and CC-BY-ND.

Offering both CC-SA and CC-BY-SA at the same time while being incompatible
is silly. Too easy to lose the ability to share with another CC project by
'accident'.

CC-SA-NC should not be offered as a license option - it is a dangerous
trap for the unwary. A read up on the historical situation with the
original roguelike games should offer an instructive insight into why. I
can see why an author may want to use NC to require others to pay him for
commercial applications - but when it becomes a shared/derived work with
multiple authors, this option is quickly lost, and all that remains is an
ill-defined clause against 'commercial use' that will haunt the project
forever.

The 'no-commercial' clause is really bad for community projects. It places
a restriction that is very hard to interpret, and there is no longer any
one copyright holder who can clear up any confusion or give explicit
permissions.

  - Per