Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On Friday 09 February 2007 05:30 am, Emerson Clarke wrote:
> Thanks everyone for you thoughts and your input...  its been an
> enlightening discussion.
>
> I have decided to release my work initially under the GPL, which i
> will probably change to some form of dual license or BSD style license
> later on.
>
> So in the last two days ive built a website and cleaned up 250,000
> lines of code to get a release out before the end of the week :)
>
> For those who are interested you can check it out here:
>
> http://reasoning.info/examples.htm
>
> And you can download it here:
>
> http://reasoning.info/download.htm

Emerson, I wish you success with your efforts. It has been quite a ride so 
far... ~;-)

Just a heads up - from this link:

http://reasoning.info/license.htm

" The commercial license also gives you access to all of the features which 
are not included in the open source version."

I personally find it a turn off and a red flag when projects do that. It 
causes me to doubt their commitment to Free software. It does not always keep 
me from the project, but if I am choosing between two, it can make a big 
difference.

I invite others to comment as well for your benefit.

Also, since you are going down the dual licensing route, you need to develop 
a 
plan for contributions. You are going to need for people to at least give you 
some sort of writen license to their GPL contributions, otherwise, if you do 
build any community of contributors, the GPL version will quickly outstrip 
the commercial one which I would not mind, but which would defeat your 
purpose.

In light of the fact that if you start getting contributions, your income 
from 
your non-free (commercial is not really the best choice of words here as you 
can easily be commercial on the free side as well) licenses will start to be 
based off of their work as well as your own, you might want to think about a 
plan which would give some of that income back to your contributors according 
to some published plan. I know of no other dual license projects which do 
this now, but some may indeed be doing it without my knowledge. If not, you 
could set a trend.

I see you are making your gpl code available for download at not cost. I 
think 
this is wise, but just for your and everyone else's information who may not 
know this yet, this is not a legal requirement. You could very well charge 
per download or for the first download every month or whatever. Trying this 
may greatly reduce your uptake, but it is legal.

Also, in our back and forth, I got the idea that perhaps you thought some of 
your stuff might benefit from patents.

I thought you might be interested in what Don Lancaster writes on the subject:

http://www.tinaja.com/patnt01.asp

 I don't think I have read it all nor is it likely that I agree with it all, 
but it is interesting.
>
> Emerson

all the best,

drew

>
> On 2/9/07, Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-05-02 at 18:47 +0000, Emerson Clarke wrote:
> > > How do you avoid the situation where no one will use your library for
> > > risk of their project becoming a clutter of licensing restrictions and
> > > yet, as an individual, still make money from software ?
> >
> > There are about a million ways to make money from producing free
> > software.
> >
> >      * Offer consulting for installation and configuration
> >      * User training and documentation
> >      * Write and sell a book
> >      * Custom extensions, plugins, or etc. for particular uses
> >      * Ask for donations
> >      * Offer a commercial license with no source-code redistribution
> >        requirement for derivatives
> >      * Sell the media (installation CDs or DVDs)
> >      * Sell schwag with the logo on it
> >      * Apply for government or foundation grants
> >      * Provide software as a service (Web service, other service)
> >
> > None of them are quite so easy as selling licenses for software, but
> > they all benefit immensely from broad distribution of Free Software.
> >
> > Probably the biggest motivation to release a work as Free Software is
> > this: if you don't, someone else will release a program that's
> > equivalent and IS Free Software, and then your proprietary software
> > sales plummet. The Free economy favours those who give their stuff away
> > soonest.
> >
> > -Evan
> >
> >
> > ________________________________________________________________________
> > Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>
> > http://evan.prodromou.name/
>
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-- 
(da idea man)