Development of Creative Commons licenses

["David Christie" <dc AT sover.net>]

> Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>
> The license you describe wouldn't qualify as open source.

I understand that it doesn't meet the Open Source Definition (OSD), surely 
the de facto definition of "open source". It would not be GPL-compatible or 
OSI-certifiable as open source. Neither is CC NC, as I understand it.

> That said, if you're primarily interested in software licenses you might 
> post your idea to http://creativecommons.org/discuss#commonwealth.  The 
> researcher running that list is interested in such licensing ideas.

Thanks for the suggestion, and I will do that.

And thanks very much for the other pointers. Just what I wanted.

> NB it isn't clear how any of the above fits into CC proper.

True. My thought was just that some part of it ought to be "in the commons", 
so an effort should be made to figure out what fits there. There are rights 
one would like to grant / guarantee, ideally to non-commercial and 
commercial users alike, for works like software intended for derivative use. 
This is essential to allow the open source community development method 
(which is what matters to me, not whether it's OSD compatible -- though 
compatibility promotes the method, and some might argue is necessary for 
it).

I like the simplicity of the CC licenses and I also like Share-alike as an 
alternative to No-derivatives. So why not something like Share-revenues as 
an alternative to Non-commercial -- provided it can be kept equally simple, 
by punting all the business arrangements onto a separate contract (which CC 
would presumably have no role in specifying). A clean separation of 
concerns.

As for my specific ideas of how a Share-revenues provision might work, I'm 
much less wedded to any of those than to the search for *some* way that it 
could work.

> I'm interested in metadata interoperability at the very least and 
> commercial adoption of CC licenses and technologies in general, but I 
> imagine some of this can/would/will be legally and politically complex.

All the more reason to find some way to keep CC out of the particulars, 
while making all that possible in principle. Then people could experiment.