Development of Creative Commons licenses

[phyllostachys nuda <phnuda AT yahoo.com>]

Sorry, I went overboard, that flaming was not right.

 

Yes, there would be a list of 'prohibited uses' in this license. Just like the GPL has a gigantic list of things you can and can't do with it. It's just a list. I listed some of the political agreements on ethics in my last message; the Geneva Conventions, the US Constitution, etc, which guarantee everyone certain fundamental rights. It is not impossible nor even improbable for diverse groups of people to agree on specifically defined ethical standards and laws; that's what society is.

 

Some people think the GPL is not very 'free', because it has these restrictions. Some corporations and organizations ban using any GPL code because they feel it is not 'free enough'. They are afraid of the GPL; they think it will wind up to be 'too restrictive' for them, or open them up to lawsuits, force them to open their code, etc etc etc.

 

But if everyone had worried about whether the GPL or BSD license would be 'popular' then they would have never been written in the first place. The same can be said of Linux and most other free software. Popularity shouldn't be prejudged too harshly. The license should exist, and be easy to use (best thing about Creative Commons), and it should be up to ordinary people to decide if they want to use it or not.

 

As for MONGO, I tried to look it up. The last version I could find was from 1998 and had no license at all that I could find, not that I went through all the .tex files looking for one. In the early 1990s apparently it required you to pay for it. I tried to look up Chaco. I can't find anything about its reason for being created. Apparently the license historians have been a little lax.

 

Now as to the question of how it would fragment because people disagree about various ethical arguments; surely, it would. But what of the dozens of different 'open source' and other free licenses that exist in the world. It's the marketplace of ideas.

 

But there are some standards that the vast majority of the world agrees on. Things like torturing POWs or slavery. If those things alone were in the license that would be a start.

 

But why computer software? Becuase of the context. Computer software is written by upper class people who have pretty decent lots in life compared to the vast majority of people. They are in a special social and economic position and perhaps they can use this position to do something about the injustices of the world.

 

Second, because computer software has been developed and used to a large degree by many forces that support injustice in the world, with nary a whimper from the 'computer community'. This goes back at least to IBM and the Nazis, Apartheid South Africa, the various Nuclear weapons programs, the Vietnam war with its cadres of systems engineers plotting equations of victory while millions died on the ground, to our modern day Great Firewall of China, built with the help of Cisco, which allows the government to murder people for speaking their mind. Computer science has a lot to answer for, and this is a chance to do it.

 

Third because computer technology, in combination with nanotech, and biotech, has the potential to be massively more destructive to life than nuclear technology could ever be. The next generation of weapons will not be about large explosions. It will be about subtle trickery of the fabric of the ecosystem. It will be about viruses, mind control, surveillance, swarms of tiny 'smart weapons' that perhaps we cannot even see. I am sure some body will say 'the authorities will never create such weapons', but please read some history books about the biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs created by Japan, the USSR, Germany, the US, and many other countries. Then I ask you, what exactly has changed since those days? Are we somehow magically evolved to the point where we carefully think through things before we do it, or do we simply do it because 'its there' or 'we are getting payed to' or 'its our job'?

 

Thank you.

 

 

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