Development of Creative Commons licenses

[tomislav medak <to-me AT mi2.hr>]

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jonathon wrote:
> tomislav medak wrote:
> 
>> What would be the benefit of such a meta button?
> 
> it would make it easier for people to tell if something was free or not.

it seems to me that we would get again a confusion if we would create a
free and non-free category, which would produce a somewhat similar,
though ideologically quite different effect we had when all licenses
were under one brand - CC license. for two reasons:

first reason would be: how do you define 'free'?, or rather 'freedoms',
or 'free enough' to be called that. for instance, freedom to share
licensed works is given by all standard CC licenses and it is a freedom.
it really comes down to defining what freedoms constitute a free license
and how you weigh the author freedoms as against the freedoms of users.
this is a much more fundamental debate.

and yet we can agree on a certain definition/understanding of 'free' -
DFSG's, FSF's, freedomdefined's, Wikipedia's and they all seem
normatively coherent when compared to NC or ND licenses. but as long as
CC decides to stay agnostic as to what constitutes 'free (enough)', this
will remain subject to dispute.

second reason would be: 'free' is a lot less precise in practical terms
than BY and BY-SA, and 'non-free' is yet again a lot more less precise
than BY-NC, BY-NC-SA, etc. this would be a step back from what we have
gained with new buttons.

i really understand the problem with the example you give, but someone
creating FLOSS should really know better than confuse ND with free software.

creating clarity for some might imply creating confusion for others.

best,

tom
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