Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Takemoto" <tim AT yamaguchi-u.ac.jp>]

Dear Mike Linksvayer,

I accept that it is not clear that the right licence played a role in the 
proliferation
of open source software. 

I am arguing that the GPL did. I am not sure of the differences between it and
the other licences, but I feel that there are bigger, crucial differences 
between
them and the application of the CC licence to text media.

Perhaps as you and other poster's suggest, the use of creative commons
licences has not yet reached a critical mass, or that there are insufficient
'networking effects' (I am not sure what these might be). 

But as explained in a previous post it seems clear that there are major
differences between text and software since software is not something
that one wants to download from anyone other than the creator(s) whereas
text is often preffered in a offline form. 

Hence if someone opensources their software then people will keep
coming back to their site to download later versions, and hopefully
make donations, and contributions, or order work (especially if the
name of the software is copyright).

However in the case of a book, people may not keep coming back to 
the site of the creator if there are others that have published the book.

You think that it is not something about the software-licence match,
and that it is more a question of time. I think that there are important
reasons why software is more appropriate to open sourcing. I am not
sure whether the same kind of success can be achieved in other 
media but making licences for text that approach the GPL ("no binding"
is my suggestion) seems like a good thing to try. 

Tim

Timothy Takemoto