Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> The resulting geo-data is licensed under CC-sa 2.0.
...
> Unfortunately, this relies on a program, cgpsmapper,
> that has license terms that insist that the output be
> for non-commercial use only:

Erm, so are you arguing that people should be able
to take content under a copyleft license and
move it to a more restrictive license if they want to?

Copyleft in its most simplest explanation is
that all copies and derivatives of the work
must be licensed under the exact same license
as the original.

Does Linux and Wikipedia and other copyleft projects
run into scenarios where people cannot put content
into the project because the content is only available
under a more restrictive license?

Yes.

But this is one of the first times in FLOSS
history where people have reacted in large swaths
by stomping their feet and blaming the license,
rather than blaming the restrictive content.

I'm not entirely sure why the basic concept of
copyleft has been lost on the topic of DRM.
I think part of it may be an issue of framing.
That the metaphors used by the parallel distribution
folks to equate DRM as a binary and parallel
distribution as source code, is part of the problem.

I pointed out yesterday that DRM maps more into a
metaphor of a software patent. And I am sure people
could come up with all sorts of heart rending stories
of FLOSS projects that would love to implement some
functionality, but that functionality is covered by
a software patent, and well, darn it, if we just
allowed software patents in copyleft licenses, then
all the FLOSS people would be able to enjoy that
patented functionality.

Just a little monopoly to give the FLOSS people
some extra functionality.

That's what parallel distribution is.
It argues to allow a platform monopoly to let
FLOSS people play their works on PSP.

Greg

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