Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Daniel Carrera said:
> Todd A. Jacobs wrote:
>
>> The invariant sections are optional, so you could simply require
>> documents to contain no invariant sections.
>
> And that would be free. But it would no longer be the FDL  :-)

Your site can tell all contributers that if they're going to contribute,
they agree to submit their work under whatever license you want,
including GNU-FDL with no invariant sections.

If they don't like the license, then they don't contribute,
but if they contribute, they do so under whatever license
you specified up front. Which means you should be able
to specifcy GNU-FDL with no invariant sections for all your
contributions.

> But in any event, I don't understand why we're talking about the FDL to
> begin with. The FDL is a nice license, but it's not one under
> consideration for me for reasons that have nothing to do with Debian.

It's probably being suggested because it's GNU's recommended license
for documentation. So, it's sort of natural that people would point
out the license recommended for documentation.

>> Maybe your best bet is just to use a modified CC-BY, and simply call it
>> something else.
>
> I don't like making new licenses. I don't want to add to the license
> pollution. Also, one of the good things of the CC-BY is that it can be
> combined with all the existing CC work. If I made a license that was
> almost like the CC-BY, but not quite the same, I would lose that
> combinability.

Again, you can specify what license you want peopel to submit
their contributions under, meaning you could ask them to Waive
attribution. Since you dont seem to require that attribution
be as "prominent" as any other attribution, waiving attribution
will make that go away, and will fix your "Fair Use" problem.
And you'll still be able to get everyone's name in the document
by way of the copyright notice.

They get Author Credit via the copyright notice, which can't
be removed. And the Creative Commons Attribution requirements
are waived, so you can't run into any of the Debian concerns
about attribution and Fair Use, etc.

> Therefore, I think I'll go for a dual licensing system. Please see my
> other post. Tell me what you think. I'm planning on a dual GPL / CC-BY
> strategy. My other post also lists my reasons.

What I don't understand is why you go from the CC-BY license
which is nearly Public Domain and jump to a copyleft license (GPL),
which is much more restrictive than CC-BY and the various
Public Domain licenses.

CC-BY is much closer to something like BSD than something like GPL.