Development of Creative Commons licenses

[j lipszyc <jl AT creativecommons.pl>]

Hi all.
Last few days i spent on other activities, but this morning i have read 
entire thread once again. And now i found that Tomos also did it, added 
lots of insight, and gave us great summary. Thanks :-)
My insight will be not technical, but somewhat fundamental, and I will 
build it on Robs email. Since there are elements of pure fiction (and 
possibly pure-nonsense, please check it :-), and i'm not in a position 
of power (i'm a mere CC activist from Poland), treat it accordingly.

rob AT robmyers.org wrote:
> It is not legally possible to produce a BY-SA that is FDL compatible. This is
> due to the upgrade clause in BY-SA 2.x which means that FDL cross-licensing in
> a newer BY-SA would apply to works placed under the older licenses that have
> not given permission to be relicensed under non-CC licenses.

I don't understand that. I agree that changes we make in 3.0 would make 
also previously relased works GFDL compatible, but why you think this is 
not legally possible? If we can deal with invariant section of GFDL (and 
it seems we can) i dont think there is something legally wrong with it. 
I hope we can deal with all technical problems listed by Tomos as well. 
But there are other problems, and more on that later.

> Let other licenses be made compatible with BY-SA. 

You know this not likely to be done. Not even in predictable future. 
Why? Because some CC actions make certain people uncertain about CC 
long-terms goals and behaviour. BY-SA license automatically updates 
itself to latest version. FSF have to trust CC to allow this for GFDL 
works. Without FSF trust - no two-way compatibility.
As you probably know i strongly believe, that CC needs something similar 
to Debian Guidelines, some kind of social contract we can treat as our 
constitution while crafting future licenses versions. This may be a good 
starting point to gain FSF trust.
But it's not going to work one side only. There is nothing wrong for 
BY-SA users to make their work GFDL compatible right now. But future is 
different: we also have to trust FSF and believe, that any changes they 
make to GFDL in future will not hurt current BY-SA users. FSF do change 
their licenses. Such change as adding something similar to "invariant 
section" (that as you know that happened) may make CC users very unhappy.
So we need trust and sadly this is something we do not have. FSF removed 
all CC licenses from their lists. Lawrence still didn't answered 
questions about it (i understand he promised to do it in his series of 
emails, but this didn't happened yet).
There is something more: Richard Stallman doesn't think, that license 
compatibility is a freedom, too. Software is different than texts of 
culture, and he simply do not have to deal with our problems. If there 
is program under non-free license he writes another one. If there is 
something under free, but GPL non-compatible license, he puts it into 
other directory. This can't be done in culture. You cannot air a movie 
with somen shots kept in other directory.
So he don't believe that license comatibility is actually something we 
should fight for, and how we are going to convince him without mutual trust?
How this can be solved if we will work hard to gain mutual trust? I 
think there are two possible solutions. First is to have a written 
agreement about freedoms guaranteed by GFDL and CC BY-SA licenses. This 
could be a base for two-way comaptibility.
Even better will be license MERGE. If CC and FSF together will worded a 
license which will suit needs of current GFDL and BY-SA users and made 
it next version of both - that will be something really, really good.

> Imagine if the FSF had modified the GPL to allow GPL-ed work to be
> taken and put under similar licenses that people wrote. This would 
not have reduced
> fragmentation either (unless Apache had acted as a Black Hole for the 
GPL as I
> guess Wikipedia would for BY-SA).

AFAIK without "invariant section" GFDL world is free (even if not 
perfect) so there is nothing wrong with it. I do not really care what 
license name is as long as it preserves freedoms i want my users to 
have. There is nothing wrong for CC to actively promote some other 
licenses than CC ones. Do we care about brand or freedom? If it's brand 
- hell, better no for all of us.

greetings
Jaroslaw Lipszyc