Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 08:54 +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Erik Moeller schrieb:
>  > 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,

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/

> 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.

Path dependency.  A priori software may not be that special.
Historically, it is.

Source-unavailable freeware, source-available payware, shareware, etc.
have been around for decades.  That no commonly applied licenses for
these have developed is a huge warning sign.

Please ignore this sign and develop and evangelize such licenses.  When
you've achieved massive adoption we could talk about a CC wrapper for
your licenses like we've done with the GPL.  But I recommend first
discussing with people who have thought about these issues deeply.  Join
http://www.crynwr.com/fsb/

-- 
  http://wiki.creativecommons.org/User:Mike_Linksvayer