Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>]

On Mon, 2005-07-02 at 15:51 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:

> However, copyrights and patents have very little in common.

Well, /one/ thing that copyright and patents have in common is that
people sometimes use them to keep us from sharing software with our
neighbours.

So it may be useful for hackers to have a way to say to the people they
make software for that they're not going to keep those people from
exercising their freedoms: not through copyright law, nor through patent
law, are they going to make more restrictions than are enumerated in the
license.

Having patent grants in our Free Software licenses doesn't _solve_ the
problem of patents; after all, someone who's never touched a line of my
program's code can try to milk money out its users to pay for a license
to their obscure patent. But at least those users would know that _I_ am
not going to try to come milk money out of them, which might make it
easier for them to use the software.

~Evan

-- 
Evan Prodromou                  .O.
http://bad.dynu.ca/~evan/       ..O
evan AT bad.dynu.ca                OOO