Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Todd A. Jacobs said:
> On Sat, Mar 05, 2005 at 09:47:05AM -0500, Greg London wrote:
>> CC-NC-SA not only doesn't keep all the derviatives equal, it witholds
>> the commercial rights to the work upfront, which then can be used by
>
> ALL licenses essentially do this, because the content creator always has
> the option to relicense their work on a commercial basis. If you release
> something under the GPL or BSD licenses, there's nothing to stop you
> from also selling the code under a commercial license at some later
> date. You can't relicense the derivatives, but the original still
> belongs to the copyright owner.

Yes, but don't tell me that Linux would have turned out the way it is
today if Richard Stallman had decided to advocate the
GNU-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license for the GNU project.

There is a difference between the individual author enabling the
community to do the best that it can do (copyleft which allows commercial
works) and the individual who restricts the community so that the
original author remains permanently at an advantage (CC-SA-NC).

> There was a recent flame war on another list about open source, and
> about what content creators owe "the community." The truth is, content
> creators don't owe anyone anything; they choose to release things that
> they hope others may find useful under whatever terms and conditions
> they release it under. If people do, great; if not, people are free to
> ignore it or create alternatives.

This isn't about whether authors owe anyone anything.
This is about whether Creative Commons is up to
creating licenses that are legitimate alternatives
to copyright, or whether CC is willing to have it's
licenses used by authors to proclaim "Free Steak Knives".

CC-NC-SA is like someone claiming "Free Steak Knives"
and then you find out in the small print that it's
$20 for shipping and handling. So the truth is it isn't
free. But Ronko has a right to proclaim "Free Steak Knives".

My point is whether CC wants to be associated with
"Free Steak Knives" to the point that when people
see a work with the CC logo on it, they just roll their
eyes, knowing the author claiming "ShareAlike-NonCommerical"
isn't Sharing anything alike.

If CC licenses didn't exist, an author would still have
the right to come up with an equivalent ShareAlike-NonCommercial
license. I'm not questioning that.

The question is whether Creative Commons
wants to be the "Ronko" of licenses or if it wants to
be something more.