Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On 14 Jun 2005, at 21:31, Greg London wrote:

> A friend of mine has a fully programmable sewing machine.

My Ex wants one of those. :-)

> You can download patterns into this thing, push a button,
> and it can create some crazy stuff. Only thing is the
> machine cost five grand.

The majority of the world's population has never made a phone call  
and Free Software comes from an era when you had to mortgage your  
house to buy a minicomputer. We're sat here discussing this on  
expensive PCs. There are some fairly deep philosophical issues around  
freedom and the ability to exercise it, but the freedom of artisans  
to share work is an important one even if the rest of us are unable  
or uninterested to. This follows on from the discussion of music  
formats.

Patterns don't take a programmable sewing machine. My mum used to buy  
physical prints of patterns, or get them with magazines. Cut it out,  
pin it to the fabric, cut it and sew it. People have done this stuff  
for decades. The physical prints are probably expensive to produce  
and less popular now. So electronic distribution of those patterns  
would be a boon.

> physical stuff will be slower to adopt creative commons
> licensing simply because it is more expensive to
> convert electronic files to real-world applications.

Wellll. :-) Clothes patterns are a counter-example because it's  
cheaper to distribute a pattern electronically than to print it, ship  
it, and keep it on the shelf for ages.

I look forward to the O'Reilley "Clothes Hacking" book and "make  
clothes" magazine. :-)

> Get a cheaper santa claus machine and you'll likely find
> more people putting up santa claus files.

Sadly, Santa uses a proprietary format. The Easter Bunny uses XML,  
but the Hallowene Document shows that there may be a patent on that...

- Rob.