Development of Creative Commons licenses

[j lipszyc <jl AT creativecommons.pl>]

Mia Garlick wrote:

> Thus, for example, Wikipedia is licensed under the Free Software  
> Foundation’s GFDL. That license essentially enables the same freedoms  
> as the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license; but you can’t  
> take content from Wikipedia and mix it with BY-SA photos from Flickr

Mia, you made my day. Thank you for officially taking this problem to
public light and willing to offer a solution. That was a major roadblock
for our movement, and now i can see it vanishing. Yuuuppppiiiieeee!

> To solve that problem, and to begin this discussion of license  
> interoperability, Creative Commons seeks comment on the attached  
> proposed amendments to Creative Commons licenses that contain a  
> ShareAlike license element. These amendments would enable dual  
> licensing of derivatives. 

Proposed amendments seem to not allow dual-licensing, but rather allow
"relicensing" (i made up this word on spot, does it exist?) work to
GFDL. Once such a relicensing is done there is no way back, you cannot
relicense it into BY-SA. Right?

If i'm right - well, it's not bad. This is in fact pulling BY-SA license
from the market and using "industry standard" GFDL. This will make a lot
of people happy, removing major barrier beetween two incompatible
license worlds.

If you ask me what is long-term solution, i would say that there are
only two working solution. First is to make BY-SA fully GFDL compatible
(and listed as such on FSF site). The second is to scrap it and use GFDL
instead (and i think this needs serious consideration).

The more i like overall direction of this project, the more problems i
see. I understand, that CC BY-SA is GFDL incompatible because it adds 
some restrictions. Are you aware of detailing lists of 
incompatibilities? Googling gave me no answers, but maybe i used wrong 
keywords.

If those differences are significant we may run into serious problem - 
by allowing relicensing work to GFDL we simply remove some restrictions. 
It's not bad, but some people rather seriously think that restrictions 
are "authors rights". I do not agree with such point of view, but if we 
promise something in common deeds we cannot than say "you know, its just 
common deeds, you really should read fine print, its written there that 
we can change the rules anytime".

Fine print says "a later version of this License with the same License 
Elements as this License". There was no option to remove this parameter. 
Note, that removing  this was possible in GPL ("or [at your option] any 
later version"), and as you know Linus Torvalds removed it from Linux 
kernel license, so kernel will never be licensed under GPL 3.

If this is not a cosmetical change we need is a serious public 
discussion on matter (and by "public" i understand not posting this on 
closed email list, or even more open cc-community, but setting up open 
wiki and linking it on Slashdot). We have to make people using our 
licenses aware of problem, our proposed solutions, and ensure 
transparent process of taking decision. Otherwise we will loose peoples 
trust.

However i think this is worth all the effort. Whatever outcome will be - 
compatibility is simply a must. The question is just "how we are going 
to do it".

PLease note, that Mia posted this email to several different emailing 
lists, including _all_ iCommons. We have to decide where this talk will 
be continued, because starting several threads on different lists will 
make following it a real pain.

greetings
Jaroslaw Lipszyc