Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Brian Schack said:
>
> On Mar 27, 2005, at 7:33 AM, Greg London wrote:
>> 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.
> ...
>> 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.
>
> According to http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html,
>> B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities
>>  responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified
>> Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the
>> Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five),
>> unless they release you from this requirement.

Uhm, if all I have to do is list the top 5 contributers,
that's a lot less overhead than list a quarter million
contributers. Don't you think? CC-Attribution requires
all contributers be listed. GNU-FDL requires the top 5.


>> I. Preserve the section Entitled "History", Preserve its Title, and
>> add  to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and
>> publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If
>> there is no section Entitled "History" in the Document, create one
>> stating the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as
>> given on its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified
>> Version as stated in the previous sentence.
>
> Plus you have to give the network location, acknowledgments,
> dedications, endorsements, front-cover texts, back-cover texts, and
> invariant sections.

All of which are OPTIONAL. The GNU-FDL site includes
explicit instructions on how to waive all of these sections.


      Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
      under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
      or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
      with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover
         Texts.  A copy of the license is included in the section entitled 
"GNU
      Free Documentation License".

Whereas CreativeCommons attribution appears "unwaivable".
Title of the work must be attributed "if provided".
Author of the work must be attributed "if provided".
Well, even if I don't want attribution, I might want to
put a title on the work along with my name. I just might
not want to require anyone else to attribute me.
I'm not clear how you title your work and put your name
on it without turning attribution "on".

And once turned on, every author must be attributed,
all 180,000 of them if need be.