Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Henri Sivonen said:
> The GFDL has less chance becoming free in the DFSG sense
> than CC-by and CC-by-sa.

Isn't the only issue around FDL being free the invariant sections?
If so, then while the license allows authors to enable certain
non-free options, the license can be used in a free manner.

i.e. no invariant sections, no front and back cover texts.

Invariant sections are a license option similar to the
way attribution is an option on all CC licenses.

> OpenOffice.org and the Mozilla Foundation have chosen the CC camp over
> the GFDL camp.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend a CC license with the current
versions because it seems to have some vagueness in the wording
to indicate how one would actually turn Attribution off, so
while attribution seems to be an option, it seems to be always enabled
with no clear way of turning it off.

And I wouldn't recommend any large gift-economy project take on
attribution as a license requirement.

If every contributer is attributed equally, then the people who
contributed thousands of words may be upset that people who
contributed 10 words are on equal footing with their name.
"all contributions get equal attribution" could also encourage
a number of people to make some small and irrelevant contribuiton
just to get attribution and put it on their resume.
"Oh, yes, I contributed to the OO documentation project,
see my name is right there on the website."

One response to this is to have attribution based on the
value of the contribution, but that simply trades one can
of worms for another can with worms of a different type.
You then open yourself to the possibility of contributers
getting upset because their self perceived value doesn't
match the value of attribution the project gave them.

You could make it non-subjective and define "value" by
simple word count. However, if a writer knows they'll
get paid 5 cents a word regardless of total length,
you suddenly find stuff that reads like "War and Peace".

For market-economy licenses, Attribution makes complete sense.

But Attribution on a large gift economy project seems to me
to be setting yourself up for a huge flame war, dissention,
and bad mojo at some point in the project's development.