Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Friday, March 19, 2004, at 00:04AM, Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org> 
wrote:

>0) I think it's a bad idea for Creative Commons to be a license
>   factory. 

I covered some of these points a couple of months back. :-) 

IMHO CC has three projects: writing licenses, explaining licenses and 
advocating licenses. CC are doing very well with all three projects, but the 
three may interact, and it's important to keep them separate and get the 
priority right. 

Too many licenses will dilute the brand as you point out. But just a few 
licenses that aren't really commons/open/free licenses will destroy value in 
the brand and, worse, give that value to people who have no intention of 
returning it. Being popular by writing weaker licenses would not be as great 
a success as educating people to use stronger licenses. 

IMVVVHO CC should leave the licenses that aren't really commons/open/free to 
the corporate and cultural wannabees, then describe those licenses clearly so 
people can make an informed choice and encourage them to make the right 
choice. This would be a win-win-win scenario. 

Really I agree with Greg London that you only need two licenses: a GPL-style 
one and a BSD-style one (I reached the same conclusion a couple of years ago 
based on aesthetics rather than any deep understanding of the issues involved 
:-)), but licensing and sharing licenses are important steps in the right 
direction (whereas IMVVHO NC, etc. aren't).

- Rob.