Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Björn Terelius" <bjorn.terelius AT gmail.com>]

On 4/24/07, drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com> wrote:

On Tuesday 24 April 2007 03:53 am, Björn Terelius wrote:

> I did not quite understand your response to the fact that freeware
> exists. There are many good freeware projects and they don't use any
> standardized license, because there is none.

I think that's his point. Get them to agree on one and then ask CC to bless
it.

When people who like Free Software see the GPL, BSD, MIT, etc, they see the
one they like as good for their use and use it. Why haven't the non-Free
freeware guys managed to come up with on in all these years?

 

The problem is that the freeware developers can not decide on a standard because there isn't even any candidate. Sure there are many freeware licenses, but each license is written for a specific project and only used by a handful of programmers.

Think about the free licenses like GPL, BSD and MIT. They all evolved from large communities, often in connection with OS programming. Later other people decided to use the same license for their projects. Non-free programming on the other hand is not suited for programming large projects, so no freeware communities has ever formed. This explains why "the freeware guys" haven't managed to come up with one in all these years.

-Bjorn Terelius