Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

On Sun, 27 Nov 2005 20:41:09 -0500
drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com> wrote:
> On Sunday 27 November 2005 04:59 pm, Rob Myers wrote:
> > Your license cannot define which of these actions is
> > "ethical" for other people, or which actions in general
> > are ethical. In contrast the GPL is the product of a
> > philosophy that defines only one thing as unethical:
> > preventing hacking. Your license will feature "ethical"
> > as a free term. The GPL realises a particular "ethic"
> > through its specific clauses.
> 
> Either that or there will be a boatload of such licenses
> as he proposes each  with their own long list of
> specifically prohibited activities. I think this  will
> actually bring divisivness whereas the GPL has some small
> possibility of  getting enemies to work together for their
> common good. (I never said I was  not a pie in the sky
> dreamer at times.)

And no one will distribute them.  The license for "MONGO",
a very popular plotting application for astronomers has
just such a license: it prohibits use for developing nuclear
weapons (I don't have the exact phrasing). Sure, it's an
admirable sentiment, but it means that none of the 
free-licensed software distributions will carry it.

Naturally, I decided not to waste my time packaging it for
Debian, since I would have to manage the distribution
personally. It's not worth it.

Predictably, the community responded by "treating it as
damage" and "routing around it" -- this resulted directly
in Space Telescope Science Institute funding a contract for
the creation of Chaco, a replacement plotting module
for Python, which is part of the "scipy" distribution.

Which demonstrates, I think, that freedom is not only
worth dying for, but it's worth spending money on too. ;-)

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com