Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Thursday 30 March 2006 01:55 am, Greg London wrote:
> > On Wednesday 29 March 2006 08:19 pm, Greg London wrote:
> >> 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.
> >
> > The problem I see with this is that I do not see that "proprietary fork"
> > is equivalent to "commercial fork"
> >
> > One person sells his version and another his.
>
> But both versions are available to everyone.
> RedHat can sell their version, but anyone
> can take RedHat's version and re-sell it too.
> All versions are under the same license,
> so this isn't a license fork,

First we have "proprietary fork" and "commercial fork" and now we have 
license 
fork. I never responded to or discussed a  license fork, just a "commercial 
fork" and I fully realise that with the GPL (a pure copyleft license) cannot 
have the license to the code modified. (Well, except for the and any later 
GPL version bit.)
>
> it's just that someone is trying to use commercial
> methods to distribute, but they get no monopoly
> on the work, or the commercial rights, or anything
> else. 

Well, except for how people are using trademarks and branding, this is so.

> So they cannot compete against the original 
> project, as their version remains part of teh
> original project. at worst, RedHat creates a
> content fork, a different piece of content
> under the same license as the original.

Since I am talking of a "commercial fork" I maintain that one project can 
compete commercially with another project even using the same unforked 
codebase much less using a forked codebase, it is just that they will be 
competing on something other than the merits of the code if the codebase is 
the same and that the competitor can soon have the same codebase if they are 
different.

It is possible though for two people to compete commerically against each 
other selling the exact same product. It is also possible in this case for 
one to sell a lot and for one to sell very little.

> but if RedHat creates a content fork that is better
> than the original, everyone can adopt their version,
> the project remains GNU-GPL, and the project wins overall.

Bingo, which is why I like the GPL so much. However, if the purpose of a 
"commercial fork" is to be commercially successful with the fork, everyone 
may not win.

So, this can go to motivations. If you contribute to Free Software 
(specifically GPL in this case) because you want better software to use, then 
you and everyone else doing this will win in any case. If however you are 
doing so to win commercially, you may or may not.
>
> Unless the license changes, the community can
> choose to reabsorb any improvements that
> some commercial enterprise adds to the project.
> and in pure copyleft, the license can't change.

Such a wonderful thing really.
>
> You just have to compete
>
> > commercially on something other than a government granted monopoly. This
> > is
> > entirely possible though. (Forgive me if I am wrong and this is a poor
> > example, but isn't fashion just such an arena? Do designers get to
> > copyright
> > their fall lines?)
> >
> > So, I took your A or B to mean one or the other of two things, not one or
> > the
> > other description of the same thing. It seems you meant the latter and I
> > do
> > not agree that that is correct as I have tried to explain.
> >

all the best,

drew
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