Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Evan Prodromou said:
> My meta-comment on the licence: eeeewwwwwwww. I don't see denying
> contributors credit for their work as some kind of wiki optimization. I
> have a hard time seeing it as a benefit at all, actually. Stripping away
> the last bit of incentive for contributions -- Eric Raymond calls it
> "ego boo" -- seems pretty wrongheaded, if not just plain stingy.

Wikipedia has 180,000 registered contributers
and "significant" unregistered contributers.
Not offering their contributers attribution
is not "being stingy", its about making the
final work actually useful, rather than requiring
an ever growing list of names be maintained
for all eternity.

And wikipedia didn't force anyone to contribute.
So apparently a quarter million contributers
didn't find it stingy enough that they withheld
their contribution.

If someone is going to start a wiki project,
they should start with attribution being to
the project itself, not the individual contributers.
If the project succeeds, it won't have
attribution overhead bogging it down.

If it doesn't succeed, the project manager
can decide to offer individual attribution
and see if that at least gets some contributions
that weren't forthcoming before.

But if you're project succeeds without attribution,
why put the extra overhead on the project?