Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On 4/24/07, Joachim Durchholz <jo AT durchholz.org> wrote:

The problem with the GPL is that it's used (abused, some will say) to
further a rather specific set of ideas about how software should be
written and distributed. In a sense, the GPL is trying to force software
creators into a specific set of behaviours, just as Copyright and Patent
law are (ab)used by companies to force creators into a different set of
behaviors.
I'd like to choose my position myself. I want freedom from political or
business agendas. I want to release software the way *I* want, and not
the way that RMS or MS have tried to pre-decide for me. (As an aside, if
I were to choose, I'd side with RMS. I don't think his agenda is
unethical or something, I just want to be able to follow my own ethics,
which isn't 100% identical with his.)

Hear, hear!

So what I really want is a set of licence building blocks that I can
choose from. The one thing that CC does for me is to do the legal
footwork and set up the fine print so that I don't have to consult a
lawyer. Not that paying a lawyer for his work is out of the question,
but I can't judge the quality of his work, and I don't have a chance
whether the text will be properly understood around the world.
The other thing is that CC has "quantized" the continuum of possible
licenses. Instead of a multitude or licenses with almost(!!) irrelevant
differences, there's a relatively small set of licenses with meaningful
differences.
That's all things that CC can do and has done for artistic works. I hope
to see the same things done for software :-)

Now, for software, the building blocks I'd want to choose from are:
* Usage restrictions. Popular ones are:
   * Not for commercial use
   * Not for military use
   * Not for porn use
   * Not for safety-critical use
* Redistribution conditions. Popular ones:
   * Not for resale
   * Don't restrict the rights when passing on
   * Allow modifications
   * Attribution
* Source
   * Give access to the sources
     ("Source" should be defined as "preferred form for modification")
   * Give access to sources of modifications
That's a few too many points, and I may have overlooked a few, so a
process to arrive at a viable form of software license, one would
probably first have to collect proposals, then concentrate the list back
to the essentials.

Hope this clears up what I'm aiming at :-)

I agree with the general idea of having a small set of licenses with meaningful differences, but in your list you have some usage restrictions that I don't think fit into that idea. The problem is mostly in the interpretation: who decides what is commercial or military use? If an employee uses a program on his office computer during his spare time, is it commercial? If civilians employed by the department of defense uses the program, is it military use? There can occur many borderline cases that are difficult to resolve and I think it is of utmost importance that the license is clear. The "no porn" case has a problem with enforceability. If the porn industry uses your program,  how are you going to get to know? And what are you going to do about it? And they are not known for following the laws anyway. I think it should suffice with a general condition: "no illegal use" which of course should apply to all licenses. If the license contained some usage restrictions, people would just want more, like options for "no nuclear research", "no genetic reseach", "only academic usage" and so on. Better to stick with a simple license. In my opinion the BY, SA, ND, NC would work just fine.

Regards
Bjorn Terelius