Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>]

On Sun, 2005-20-11 at 09:53 +0000, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> > Second, I think that one-way compatibility is a good idea...
>
> But how do you feel about the Invariant Sections issue? You release a 
> work under the BY-SA, someone relicenses it under the GFDL and adds the 
> 'xyz Manifesto' in front as an Invariant Section.
I think invariant sections are self-correcting. If they're odious and unbearable, downstream users will either use the older, unmarred version of the document, or they'll fork and create a new version without an invariant section. If they're bearable, people will just live with them.
> I like the idea of compatibility. Even one-way compatibility. But I have 
> serious concerns over the invariant sections issue. I don't want my work 
> to be made more closed when I intended it to be open.
I understand your concerns, but I think it's important to be pragmatic, here. Is there is any chance whatsoever that the FSF is going to drop Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Text, and or Back-Cover Text from the FDL? I think not.

Can we have works relicensable under the GFDL and prevent them from having invariants added? No, we cannot. If we did, then the works wouldn't be licensed under the GFDL; they'd be GFDL + some other restrictions, which can't be done by the terms of the GFDL itself.

So, lastly, are invariants bad enough that we shouldn't make derivatives of the by-sa relicensable under the GFDL? I'd say no, they are not. They're noxious, but as the saying goes the Internet routes around stupidity.
> > Thirdly, I don't think there's much point in having a referendum on the 
> > quality of the GFDL. It is in effect just about equivalent to the 
> > Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 and above, with the differences being how 
> > many and which extraneous bytes each license requires distributors to 
> > include.
>
> What about Invariant Sections? BY-SA 1.0 didn't have that.
As I said, Invariant Sections are just a lot of extraneous bytes that have to be toted around with each version. Here's a little table counting up the extraneous bytes attached to works licensed under different licenses:

GFDL

by-sa

Copyright notices License text (about 12 pages) License notice ("Permission is granted...") Warranty disclaimer(s) Front-cover texts (5 words per author) Back-cover texts (25 words per author) Notice of publisher's name Title Transparent copy or network location of same History section Acknowledgements section Dedications section Invariant sections All previous authors up to 5 names, plus whatever new authors make modifications

Copyright notices License text or URI License notice(s) Warranty disclaimer(s) All authors' names or designated attribution parties Title Rights info URI Changelog

I hear what you're saying about the extra conditions that downstream authors can impose on a work if it's relicensed under the GFDL. I just think that the problem is less important than allowing GFDL'd projects to incorporate by-sa work.

~Evan

--
Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>