Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> This is the point of divergence: I don't see the existance of individual
> copies of a work that can't be freely used as having a substantial
> effect on the freeness of the work.  Requiring people distributing
> restricted copies of the work and derivitives to also provide
> unrestricted copies means that the work can be used in a free manner.
> The platform is restricted, the work is not.

What if you could be allowed to somehow fork Linux
into a different distribution?

Redhat versus Suse or something like that?

Now, what if you could somehow make one distribution
closed/proprietary, but satisfy the license by making
a parallel copy available that works on the other
distribution?

Maybe you allow Redhat to close itself off, and
people can no longer modify source code for redhat,
but instead they get "equivalent" source code
that runs on Suse. You can't actually do anything
with your Redhat system anymore because your source
code only works with Suse.

It's all functionally equivalent, but if you use
Redhat, you used a closed system, you don't have
compilable Redhat source code, you have code that
works on Suse.

Would you consider that platform monopoly in the
form of a closed off distribution to be any
more Free than a platform monopoly in closed off
hardware?

I wouldn't.

Greg
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