Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Jonathon Blake" <jonathon.blake AT gmail.com>]

Greg wrote:

>has no experience with how Open Source works, and would be willing to
contribute to your documentation anyway.

I'll have to go through my records, to see if that holds.
I know I've had more requests to describe the conversion path from
commercial programs than from FLOSS programs.   I don't remember where
the contributors came from.

>for people looking for restrictions against commercial uses, and yet
these people think they're working towards something Free or Open like
Linux is.

The basic software models are:

i) Free speech, free beer;    Linux
ii) Free speech not free beer;  ( value added Linux vendors )
ii) Not free speech, free beer ;  Shareware / freeware
iv) Not free speech, not free beer;    Windows

For copyright, these roughly are:

The CC-SA attempts to be the "free speech free beer" licence.
The CC-NC-SA attempts to be the "value added vendor" licence.
The CC-NC-ND attempts to be the "not free speech, free beer" licence.
"All Rights Reserved" is the "not free speech, not free beer" licence.

What are the grounds for assuming that the CC-NC-ND or CC-NC-SA don't
recognize that they are trying to be either "value added vendor" or
"not free speech, free beer" licence?

>so they haven't been forced to look at their flawed assumptions about
gift economies.

> Small projects can use the ShareWare approach and succeed because they're 
> small. CC-NC-SA can succeed in small projects because small projects never 
> scale beyond the point where the licensing fails.

> BTW, the software that your documentation covers, how is it licensed?

One program has a dual licence -- LGPL & something else.  [The
documentation I wrote for this one is CC-BY-SA  ]

The other program has a licence based upon Matthew 10:8.  [
Distribution within a commercial context is prohibited. ) [The
documentation I wrote for this one is CC-SA-NC ]

> Does the software succeed because it is a Market Economy driven
> project? Or is it a Gift Economy project?

The Office Suite is Market Economy driven.
The Bible Study Program is Gift Economy driven.

I don't code for either of them.  I simply write documetnation for them.

> How much work did you put into the documentation versus how much has been 
> from contributions from other people? 90-10? 50-50? 10-90?

CC-SA Licence documentation:  Probably 500 hours of my time to write & edit 
it.
Perhaps as much as 10% of it is from contributions by other people.

CC-SA-NC Licence documentation:  Probably 2 500 hours of my time to
write & edit.
At least 25% of it is from contributions by other people.

>What is the actual software?

The LGPL is an office suite.  The other one is a Bible Study program.

I don't have reliable figures on the market share of either one. :(


xan

jonathon
--
Ethical conduct is a vice.
Corrupt conduct is a virtue.

Motto of Nacarima.