Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Rob Myers said:
> On 26 Mar 2005, at 20:06, Greg London wrote:
>> But my main argument is that if
>> a project can succeed without
>> attribution per individual contributer,
>> then isn't the project better off
>> without the extra overhead?

> What is the social contract of wikis? Why do people submit work to
> wikis? Do they want people to know who they are? Or are they happy to
> be part of the hive mind?

HIVE MIND? interesting choice of metaphor.
Does that make wikipedia the queen bee
since it has no attribution requirement?

As for the answers to your questions,
180,000+ wikipedians answered that they
don't do it for attribution.

I wouldn't call those people hive minded.
I'd call them selfless or community-minded.

> This non-attribution license is going to be like crack cocaine for
> every organisation that wants that cool "open" aura without having to
> give anything away. Here, at last, is the "what's mine is mine, what's
> yours is mine" license that big media has wanted for so long. And it's
> under a Creative Commons banner.

crack cocaine? Did I simply imagine that
the wiki license included ShareAlike?

No matter what Borg-like image you wish to paint,
Microsoft is not going to use this license
to assimilate the planet. All we're talking
about is the attribution piece of it.
Whatever 7-of-9, Bill Gates, and the hive mind
creates is still ShareAlike and therefore can be
used by the Federation to defend itself.

By your same argument, GNU-FDL should have caused
a great number of Borg projects to spring forth
because it doesn't require attribution either.
But I have not seen any crack-cocaine-like usage
of that license by any borg like species.

The copyleft/sharealike aspect of cc-wiki
keeps the license firmly in the free/libre space.

<>

The point of CC licenses, I thought, was to offer
the users of the licenses different options,
not mandate how they use them. While users still
don't have an option to remove attribution completely,
they at least now have an option to minimize
and centralize it so that it doesn't have
accumulative affects within a project.

I'm still waiting for a CC-AW license to make it
clear that the person who licensed the work
has waived their attribution requirements.

But at least cc-wiki gives some finer grained control
over attribution, especially for the very sort of
projects that could most directly benefit from it.