Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Jim Cheetham said:
> Greg London wrote:
>> With CC-NC, the author reserves the right to take
>> an action that could harm the community contributions.
>>
>> With GNU-GPL, the author surrenders that right irrevocably.
>
> No. With either license, a "big-name company" can approach the original
> author, who explicitly CAN re-license their own original work under
> whatever new terms they desire.


The difference is that with GNU-GPL, the GNU-GPL version is
able to pick up corporate users. So, there is less incentive
for "Big Name Company" to offer Alice money for a proprietary
version of her software. If they do, they pay money for a
piece of software that will have to compete with the GNU-GPL
version. If tehre is a market, BNC's competition could work
together using their resources and the community resources
to maintain the GNU-GPL version to be on par or better than
the proprietary version maintained by BNC.

On the other hand, if Alice licenses her work CC-NC,
no corporate users are allowed, which means if there
is a market for the work, BNC will want to come in
and offer Alice an exclusive agreement to get a proprietary
license to her work. BNC will then have the only
commercial version of the work, and their competitors
cannot use the CC-NC version or the community at large
to compete against BNC. This ends up screwing the community
over because they are left with no corporate allies
and have to attempt to keep the work on par with BNC
themselves. And so, communities have no incentive to
invest major time into a CC-NC work.

GNU-GPL eliminates most of the incentive for BNC to
attempt to monopolize the work. They can get a proprietary
version, but the GNU-GPL version is still able to compete
commercially against them.

CC-NC creates an enticement to monopolize the work.
If BNC gets an exclusive commercial license from Alice,
they lock out the rest of their business competition.

This gives a community incentive to contribute to
a GNU-GPL work, because the community version is likely
to remain competitive with a proprietary forked version.

And this gives a community dis-incentive to contribute
to a CC-NC work, because BNC has incentive to buy out
the author, and teh author then has monetary incentive
to leave the community version high and dry.