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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Unbundling the GPL

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Joachim Durchholz <jo AT durchholz.org>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Unbundling the GPL
  • Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 14:41:29 +0200

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




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