Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

>> It prevents proprietary forking, and it prevents
>> a commercial forks of the project from competing with
>> the original gift-economy version of the project.
>
>If I understand you correctly, I do take issue with this
>though. One of the key features of the GPL is that it
>does indeed allow for forks of the project, commercial
>or volunteer driven, it just requires what it requires.
>Given what it requires though, the original project can
>take back and incorporate the improvements made by the
>fork. So, it does discourage "unnecesary" forking. I
>think. Which is a good thing. I think.

Well, by "proprietary fork" or "commercial fork"
I mean someone is able to get more rights to the
work than is available to the gift economy project.
Copyleft prevents anyone from changing the restrictions
on a project, which means you can't have Linux
start out GNU-GPL, and then have Microsoft come along,
create a derivative and license it "all rights reserved".

That's what I mean by proprietary fork or commercial
fork. The license for the project started out one way,
and then someone came along and forked the project under
a different license with different restrictions.

There are, uhm, I'm not sure what you call them, er...
well, I'll just call them "content forks", which are
different than "proprietary forks". A content fork
means someone took the original content and created a
derivative that is distinct from the original, but is
still under the same license. The most obvious example
I can think of is the Linux desktop fork between
Gnome and KDE. Both are licensed under GNU-GPL. and
for the most part, I don't consider content forks to
be threat to gift economies. A bit of a hassle, sometimes,
but not a direct threat the way a proprietary fork can be.

Since you can prevent proprietary forks and commercial
forks with a license and since I know of no way to
prevent a content fork with a license (nor would I
really want to), when I'm talking about licenses and
forking in the same sentence, I probably mean proprietary or
commercial forking if I didn't specify.

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