Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Joachim Durchholz <jo AT durchholz.org>]

drew Roberts schrieb:
> 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 same question could have been posted in the years before the CC 
initiative started. There's always a date when things get started; if 
the answer to the question "why wasn't this done before" were really 
relevant, nothing would ever be done.

Though, in this particular case, I do have at least a partial answer: 
because those companies that have a legal department good enough to set 
up such a license, they will invariably come up with one that's too 
restrictive for general usage. Corporate lawyers are, after all, charged 
with upholding the company's goals, not with public interest.

> > Hence the incompatibility 
> > exists. Adding a standardized license would make the freeware more
> > useful, and could possibly persuade the developers to release it as a
> > free project later.
>
> So, what more do you need than ND gives you?

The problem is that CC doesn't seem to have checked their standard 
licenses for appropriateness for software. In other words, using an ND 
license might end up granting rights that I didn't intend to grant, 
and/or restricting rights that I didn't intend to restrict.
In other words, CC doesn't give me anything in that case, and then I can 
just as well stick with copyright.

If CC said "you can license your software under by, by-nd, or by-nc", 
then I'd assume the situation was checked and the legal fine print was 
adapted to fit that purpose.
However, since CC explicitly recommends just using the GPL instead of 
applying one of the other licenses, I have to assume that these other 
licenses won't have the intended effect.
A pity.

Oh, one example. An inside view actually.

I'm a freelancer with a companion whom I'd have to persuade to GPL our 
jointly-authored works. Currently, he'd flatly refuse to do so, because 
we both have to live off that work and we don't have enough of a 
reputation to attract sponsors. And he'd be d**n right with that 
opinion, as much as I'd like to apply the GPL.
Now when the software matures, we'll still not be able to release it 
under the GPL. It would be a very immediate and abrupt step. We'd have 
trouble explaining our customers why we give something away for free 
that we charged them hefty sums for. We'd never know how many start-ups 
would outgrow us using our code - not that this scenario is probably, 
but it's an additional risk in an already-risky business where the tides 
can turn at a month's notice.
Finally, we'll see software rot set in, at which point releasing it 
under the GPL would be a possibility, but very much useless - the only 
thing that we could gain is that "we're the company that the open source 
hackers declared so ugly that they rejected and rewrote everything from 
scratch". That's a PR desaster that *has* happened to Netscape and that 
we wouldn't wish to repeat; they also lost the advantages of having the 
best knowledge of the browser's internals in-house, because now 
internals were being developed in the FOSS community. In summary, while 
Netscape has contributed the initial critical mass for Firefox and we 
all have to be thankful to them for that, they lost an image of 
technical competence and weren't even financially rewarded - maybe 
Netscape is big enough to survive such a double blow, but we two 
certainly are not. (Hey, the business is still in its infancy - we 
started work in 11/07!)

With more gradual licensing options, we'd be able to loosen up the 
restrictions a little bit, adapt our software and our business model to 
the changed conditions, loosen up the restrictions a bit more, and 
continue until we arrived at a truly FOSS license.
That way, we could contribute to the public (something that we both 
would very much like to do) without risking being overrun by the changes 
that we started ourselves.

Regards,
Jo