Development of Creative Commons licenses

["J.B. Nicholson-Owens" <jbn AT forestfield.org>]

drew Roberts wrote:
> I remember when the idea for using the term Open Source was first
> bandied about publically. Seems to me one of the thoughts put forward
> was that Open Source was in effect just a marketing ploy for Free
> Software aimed at getting it adopted for other reasons by those put
> off by the talk of freedom.

That is exactly how the OSI advertises their activity today -- they say 
"The Open Source Initiative is a marketing program for free software." 
in their FAQ.

But the OSI gives their imprimatur to some licenses that the Free 
Software Foundation (the older organization that defines "free software" 
and decides which licenses are free software licenses) doesn't.  So, the 
OSI is not merely marketing free software.  The OSI is pursuing a 
different philosophy which has some practical differences with software 
freedom.

For instance, versions 1.x of the Apple Public Source License (APSL) 
required licensees to notify a central authority of changes to deployed 
APSL-covered programs.  That central authority was Apple.

The OSI gave the early APSL their stamp of approval, making it an 
OSI-approved license.  The FSF decried the lack of privacy inherent in 
notifying a central authority of "deployed" changes because a 
fundamental part of software freedom is the freedom "to make 
modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without 
even mentioning that they exist" (from the definition of free software). 
 This justified withholding free software status from the latest of the 
1.x APSLs.

Apple wanted the APSL to be a free software license.  So they made 
changes and produced the APSL v2 which does not have the problems which 
prevented the APSL from being a bona fide free software license.  As a 
result of Apple's diligence in pursuing software freedom, some parts of 
MacOS X are free software.  You can get a free software OS made from 
these parts and other free software if you get GNU/Darwin.  Some other 
parts of MacOS X (including Quartz, the PDF display software, and most 
QuickTime codecs as well as Apple's QuickTime implementation) are 
proprietary software.  Thus, MacOS X is not a free software OS.

Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html for more explanation on this.