Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>]

So, we're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the announcement of
the Founders' Copyright.

I'm not on the inside at Creative Commons, and there's probably a lot
that has happened that's not visible to the public. But as far as I
can tell from my outsider perspective, the world of the Founders'
Copyright is frozen in April 2003.

Everything that "will" be released under the Founders' remains in the
future tense. The "online registry" that is supposed to list Founders'
Copyright works doesn't seem to exists, as far as I can tell. Some of
the other things that are mentioned in that press release, like the
release of out-of-print O'Reilly books under the Attribution license,
also haven't happened (although O'Reilly does have some other books
released under the GFDL or GPL).

Some works that were supposed to be released under the Founders' have
in the meantime actually been released under other licenses. For
example, Dr. Lessig's "next book", _Free_Culture_, is currently
available under by-nc.

I realize that projects sometimes fall by the wayside. That's just the
nature of volunteer organizations. The Founders' seems like a
particularly labor-intensive, centralized project; I can see how it
wouldn't quite get off the ground.

But after a while there comes a time when you just have to make an
organizational decision if you're going to do something or not. It's
confusing to tell people that there's a program for the Founders'
Copyright when, hell, let's face it, there just _isn't_. And it's
confusing to say that there are a bunch of works that "will" be
released under the Founders' "soon", when the way it looks now _none_
of these works will _ever_ be released under the Founders'.

I realize that I've mentioned this before, and I feel kinda stupid
bringing it up again. I won't do it three times, I promise. I guess
it's mostly just that I believe in Creative Commons, and I don't like
seeing it look bad. And the unmaintained Founders' Copyright project
just looks bad.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>
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