Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Rob Myers said:
> The sad thing is that BSD provides a fig-leaf for "just giving something 
> away"
> rather than "keeping it free". AdTI were going to try to spin BSD to be a
> "real" Free Software license and the GPL as a "hybrid". Thank goodness for
> Growklaw.

I don't have a problem with BSD-style licenses.

I'm starting to get how much I hate the language of "free", though.

Copyleft is not best described as "free".
It is best described as "community".
A copyleft license guarantees that the work and
all its derivatives remain in the community.

BSD and Public Domain are best described as a "Commons".
And a commons is something that anyone can feed off of
for personal gain or community benefit.

It's too late to change the "branding" of Creative Commons,
but I hate their choice of name. It's like copyleft describing
itself as "free". Both pay little heed to the meaning of the
language they selected.

Stallman choose "free" because it's a great rallying cry
to talk about "free speech, not free beer", to talk about
the right to code, etc. But GPL is really a community license.
No privatization is allowed. That freedom is removed.

GPL puts community above the individual, which is fine.
I don't have a problem with the GNU licenses.

But it isn't "free" the way free speech allows an individual
to say anything they want, including the freedom to dissent
against the community.

Copyleft ==> community first
Public Domain ==> commons everyone first
All rights reserved ==> individual first

Greg

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