Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

While attribution may seem harmless, and while
it seems sensible to follow the statistics that
most CC licenses were generated with
Attribution, the thing is that CC's model
is one of a Market Economy.

CC's model is for small projects, a single
author releasing some work, and perhaps
one or two remixes occur after that.
The Derivation tree is exceeding short,
it's actually more like a shrub or bush.

Some of the software you get with RedHat linux
and other distributions can trace its roots
back to 1984. The number of contributers is
massive. The derivation tree
would look like a mile-wide Sequoia.

Boot up time for Linux, including the time
for its "Attribution Splash Screen" would
be an hour.

Having attribution embedded in the source code
with URL's and names and copyright notices is
fine. but "Reasonable to the medium" and splash
screens would choke any large, self-sustaining
gift economy.

Self-sustaining means always accumulating.
Wikipedia will always be accumulating entries
as time goes by and current events become
historical fact. This means that wikipedia
will have an ever-accumulating mass of
contributers that would make a splash screen
impossible.

having Attribution on any long term project
is short-sighted.



Evan Prodromou said:
>>>>>> "GL" == Greg London <email AT greglondon.com> writes:
>
>     GL> I don't think attribution would meet the OSD.
>
> I asked on the license-discuss mailing list about this, and was
> referred to the Attribution Assurance License, an OSI-approved
> license:
>
>          http://opensource.org/licenses/attribution.php
>
> Probably worth noting is the following clause:
>
>          2. Redistributions of the Code in binary form must be
>          accompanied by this GPG-signed text in any documentation and,
>          each time the resulting executable program or a program
>          dependent thereon is launched, a prominent display (e.g.,
>          splash screen or banner text) of the Author's attribution
>          information, which includes:
>
>          (a) Name ("AUTHOR"),
>          (b) Professional identification ("PROFESSIONAL IDENTIFICATION"), 
> and
>          (c) URL ("URL").
>
> I believe that's actually more than CC's Attribution license element
> requires.
>
> ~ESP
>
> --
> Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>
> Wikitravel - http://wikitravel.org/en/
> The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide
> _______________________________________________
> cc-licenses mailing list
> cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
>
>


-- 
"Impatient Perl" => Perl geek in about a week.
http://www.greglondon.com/iperl/index.html
Available in GNU-FDL, HTML, PDF, and paperback.