Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Joachim Durchholz <jo AT durchholz.org>]

Erik Moeller schrieb:
> On 4/23/07, Joachim Durchholz <jo AT durchholz.org> wrote:
> > However, they aren't applicable to all situations. The GPL is
> > Attribution/Derivative/Share-Alike, the LGPL is Attribution/Derivative.
> > There's no option for Noncommercial or No-Derivative.
> >
> > I think cc.org could help here.
>
> If by "help" you mean "cause needless division, friction and
> incompatibility", then yes ;-).

Please elaborate.
I think to the contrary: since there's a need for non-free licenses (as 
the various license models have shown), it will help reduce the license 
clutter for software what isn't free by the FOSS definition but still 
useful to the general public.

> Even if one buys into the notion that there are different "sharing
> cultures" around culture as a whole,

Actually, CC already has embraced that notion.
Otherwise, there would be just a single license, its contents equivalent 
to what's currently known as "Attribution/Share-Alike".

> the open source/free software movement has clearly converged on a high
> standard of freedom.

Of course those who write FOSS have converged on licensing terms that 
uphold the FOSS definition; that's a circular argument.
It neglects those who don't fit the definition of FOSS.

> The success stories of Apache, Linux, MySQL, and
> so on would have been impossible without commercial use rights.

Sure. A Commercial or Non-Derivative license would definitely have been 
wrong for these software packages.
On the other hands, there are numerous less well-known software packages 
that would have been more clearly labelled as "this is not Open Source 
but you can use it anyway" if cc.org offered those other licenses.

> If you want to create a new fringe movement, I don't think it is the
> role of CC to support that.

No.
The GPL looks like good legal work, but it doesn't really fit the 
licensing model of cc.org, and I'm curious why there's such a peculiar 
exception. Software is special, but it's not so special that it warrants 
such a massive exception as having just a single license that uses 
different language, different legal concepts, etc.
I also see drawbacks; it's unclear how to apply the CC framework to a 
work that's a combination of software and other art, for example.

Regards,
Jo