Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Wednesday, August 18, 2004, at 01:04AM, Greg London <email AT greglondon.com> 
wrote:

>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.

They cannot, however, give an exclusive license to the old, GPL version. They 
cannot unlicense that work.

With large-scale projects (many contributors), you need the permission of 
each to change the license. This can be done, but it's not as easy as 
Trolltech or MySQL (say) changing their licensing conditions on their 
wholly-owned codebase.

>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.

The database company MySQL were taken to task for (perceived?) license drift 
on Slashdot recently. I think the best commentary on GPL/commercial dual 
licensing from that discussion was:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118195&cid=9987606

The poster argues basically that if you offer GPL/commercial dual licensing 
you have to misrepresent the GPL as noncommercial.

>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.

Yes, and all that derived work then becomes so much free advertising. The 
original author would need the permission of contributors to relicense their 
contributions, though (which they are free not to give)[is this right?].

- Rob.