Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Daniel Carrera <daniel.carrera AT zmsl.com>]

Tsiavos,P wrote:
> We thought of using a provision similar to the one that Mia suggests
> but ...BBC legal

BBC? *the* BBC? As in the British Broadcasting Corporation?

> ... we decided to opt out. The reasons ... may be summarised as follows:

Thank you. Those are some very strong reasons. I guess that making BY-SA 
and GFDL compatible is not feasible without changes to the GFDL, which 
the FSF is probably not prepared to do.

> -	there is a good reason why there is a number of different 
> Free/ open content licences out there: people have different needs.

I don't think that the number of licenses is reflective of the need. 
Some times you have two licenses that make similar attempts at 
addressing the problem but are still incompatible. Some times an earlier 
attempt turns out to have problems, so someone else makes another 
license better with a better solution to the problem.

I think the GFDL is in this category. It was one of the first licenses 
that tried to apply a copyleft to documents. An early attempt. Some 
projects like Wikipedia took it because that's what was available. Some 
time later, another project (CC) made a better attempt. But projects 
that already chose the GFDL are stuck with it. Like Wikipedia.

I think that if Wikipedia were to pick a license today, they'd pick 
BY-SA. But BY-SA was not around (or at least not big and well known) 
when Wikipedia started. And now they are stuck with a bad choice. The 
best license for Wikipedia would be BY-SA version 2.5. But that license 
didn't appear until *this* year.

So all these licenses reflect historical baggage, and not a fundamental 
need for so many licenses. I think it's a worthy goal to try to find a 
way to merge works under licenses with the same goals. In my ideal 
world, the GFDL would be modified to allow relicensing under BY-SA. Of 
course, I doubt this would happen.

> What are we trying to achieve with a homogenization of the licences?

* To be able to mix work under licenses that try to do the same thing, 
but still happen to be incompatible due to techicalities.

* To reduce fragmentation. Having many small isolated islands of work is 
not desirable. The copyleft licenses are only useful to the extent that 
there are many works available under those licenses.

* To reduce confusion and complexity.

> An one size fits all approach may not be what we need here.

No one is suggesting one size fits all. But it's reasonable to aim for a 
small number of sizes that fit most people :-)

Consider the open source world:
* Roughly 70% of the work is GPL, 20% is LGPL, and 8% is BSD.
* BSD is compatible with LGPL and GPL.
* LGPL is compatibe with GPL.

This gives open source a lot of sharing opportunity. If you find two 
open source projects that could share code, it's generally possible to 
do it (from a legal POV).

Consider the free culture world:
* There's a huge amount of work under GFDL (e.g. Wikipedia).
* There's a huge amount of work under BY-SA.
* Both licenses try to solve the same problem.
* These two bodies of work are incompatible.

The work available is divided in half, and is not legally possible to 
reconcile them, no matter how much the project members want it.

> If the objective is to simplify things perhaps we should be working
> on creating CC modules that would encourage solutions similar to the
> commons deed in other communities rather than trying to make all
> licences fully interoperable.

Please don't say "all" licenses. This discussion is about one specific 
license, the GFDL. You can't make all licenses compatible, but you can 
try to take the two biggest licenses compatible. This would amount to 
doing the 1% of the work that would gives you 80% of the benefit.

In any event, it looks like merging GFDL and BY-SA is not feasible :(

Cheers,
Daniel.
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