Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>]

>>>>> "BF" == Ben Francis <lists AT hippygeek.co.uk> writes:

    BF> If CC are making a concious decision NOT to make the licenses
    BF> DFSG-free and have a good reason for doing so, I'd like to
    BF> hear their reason and would respect their decision.

Let me first say that I don't speak for Creative Commons, and that the
organization's motivations are usually opaque to me. This is my guess
on the matter, so take it with a grain of salt.

First, I think that making their licenses DFSG-free, or getting OSI
approval, is _not_ a first priority for Creative Commons. That's not
what CC is here for, and I think the party line is that software and
other kinds of content are materially different and freedom for one is
different than freedom for the others.

Second, I think but don't know that there may be some aversion to
identifying licenses that _could_ be DFSG-free (the Attribution and
Attribution-ShareAlike), since this would point out that the other
licenses (with NonCommercial or NoDerivatives clauses) are _not_.

    BF> But if there's no good reason why they couldn't be DFSG-free
    BF> and they simply don't know about it yet I think it would be
    BF> worth while altering them to meet the guidelines.

I am terribly disappointed in debian-legal for flubbing this
opportunity. The Creative Commons licenses went under review in
January, and debian-legal's opinion was solicited:

       http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/01/msg00241.html

The new 2.0 licenses were made available just a few weeks ago, with
plenty of time for the Debian analysis that was pointed to today to be
incorporated. The fact that debian-legal didn't make its opinions
known to CC before that happened is a grievous error of judgement.

Anyways, that's my opinion on the matter.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>
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