Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Luis Villa" <luis AT tieguy.org>]

On 3/7/07, drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 07 March 2007 09:39 pm, Luis Villa wrote:
> > On 3/7/07, Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
> > > Hi all,
>
> > >
> > > Now I want to prove it. You know, with *evidence*. ;-)
> > >
> > > No facile "well it's not 'free' so it's not in the 'commons'" word
> > > games. I need actual empirical evidence that NC (including NC-SA) works
> > > do not get reused, improved, disseminated, etc. as efficiently as By or
> > > By-SA works do.
> >
> > [Sorry, this is too short, deserves a lot more, but I'm busy ATM :/
> >
> >There are some variants of open source software
> > licenses with NC terms, but they aren't popular.
>
> Huh? You have lost me there. Can you explain and give examples? Isn't this
> impossible by definition?

I use the term 'open source' loosely here; not OSI-approved, but
rather in the broader family of source-available software copyright
licenses, some of which are similar in spirit to NC. (Search for
'commercial' in http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/ for some
examples. You've never heard of most of them, which I think helps
prove the point- projects which use them tend to die or relicense.)

> > I disagree with Greg's suggestion that this is psychological; if
> > people didn't want to contribute under restrictive licenses then the
> > BSD and Apache licenses would be much more commong than they currently
> > are. They aren't, so we have to look for non-psychological reasons.
>
> I am not sure I follow this line of thinking. Can you explain this as well?
> (No pressure.)

Greg says:

"Well, it's based in part in an understanding of human psychology.
Why do people contribute to a Free project?
The answer seems to reflect a notion that most people who contribute
to Free projects don't want to contribute their time and energy to
something that is restricted as much as CC-NC is."

While Greg wasn't completely clear, he seemed to be arguing that other
things being equal, people would contribute to projects under less
restrictive licenses.

GPL is a more restrictive license than BSD or Apache, and yet is
vastly more popular, so I think Greg's contention (if I understand it
correctly) is incorrect.

Hope that clarifies-
Luis