Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

> I do think that one can write closed-source software without
> being unethical

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I have no problem with All Rights Reserved
as a licensing concept. I have issue with DRM and an end to
Fair Use and copyright terms that seem to go on forever,
but I don't think it unethical to reward creators with
some limited set of proprietary rights for their works if that's
how they wish to be compensated.

> (this is the point where I think that RMS and the
> FSF overstate the case, even though such overstatement
> may be necessary for political reasons).

Except you are missing one very important thing:
RMS may be overstating the reasons for his license,
but that has absolutely nothing to do with whether
the license is a functional solution or not.

>From a game theory point of view, creating new intellectual
works with no Copyright law at all is a Hostage Scenario.
If one person stands up to fight the hostage taker, they
take on a huge risk and are better off keeping their head
down, doing nothing.  Stalemate.

Copyright creates an incentive to break that stalemate.
The idea being to reward people directly for their
labors put into creating new works. Creating works is
a risk, and the reward is made to compensate for that.

The alternative solution to the Hostage Scenario is
if all (or a large number) of the hostages rise up
together to take on the bad guy simultaneously,
distributing the risk, but keeping the reward the same.
It's a distributed solution, many individuals,
rather than a proprietary solution with a single individual.

And, wouldn't you know it, copyleft and public domain
style licenses just happen to dovetail in precisely
with a distributed solution. Copyright dovetails in
precisely with a proprietary solution.

So, the problem is that creating new works is a
Hostage Scenario in game theory terms.
The two known solutions are either an individual
rises up and takes on all the risk, and is rewarded
personally (copyright), or many individuals work together,
distributing the risk and cost, such that the individual
risk/cost is small enough that people don't need direct
monetary compensation for their time and energy (FLOSS).

All Rights Reserved and FLOSS licenses happen to land
on the spectrum exactly where there are two solutions
to the problem. Whether RMS overstates the reasons is
irrelevant to the fact that the license is exactly
where it needs to be for a distributed solution to
the hostage scenario stalemate.

NonCommercial and NoDerivatives don't provide any new
solutions. All they do is take the single-individual,
proprietary, all rights reserved, solution, and try to
shift it a little bit to the left.

It's still one person getting the lion's share
of the benefit, it's just moving some of the costs
around a little bit. I call it the "Free Advertising"
license. That's about all it does.

So, you can talk all you want about what RMS says,
you can talk all you want about it being all about
politics, but that doesn't change the fact that the
problem has two solutions, one proprietary and one
distributed.

> However, I also don't understand that there are dozens of more-or-less
> "open" software licenses; I can see the usefulness of a handful, but
> last time I looked at the oss site, there was a bewildering array.

Most of the FLOSS licenses boil down to either
copyleft or BSD-style (public domain) licenses.
The differences is mostly in whose corporate name
is in the various licenses.

> There have been several attempts at unifying FOSS licensing,
> none of which were successful. One of my hopes is that CC
> can establish a better precedent.

By creating more licenses?

> Actually, that's still far more than the usual
> "All Rights Reserved" disclaimer. And it can be useful,
> e.g. for promotional purposes, or when somebody
> just wants to share his work. It would apply to
> a lot of freeware, too.

But the presence of the license doesn't create a "state change"
the way the presence of a FLOSS license does. Without any FLOSS
licenses, the distributed solution is possible, but difficult
to maintain compatibility, protect the works, etc, etc.

With a FLOSS license, the distributed solution can be
leveraged to solve various problems. The presence
(or lack thereof) of a NonCommercial or NoDerivative
license doesn't invoke a state change in the creators
or users, because it doesn't provide any new solution
to the hostage scenario problem. It's the same solution,
proprietary, all rights reserved, with a tweak.



> I'd like to relicense some of that stuff
> in half-open form. NC-ND would
> actually serve me well in some cases.

Stop right there.
You can't call NC-ND "half-open".
Whether something is "open" or "free" is sort of
like whether light is a wave or particle.
It is wave or particle, and there is no in between.
There is no "half-open" FLOSS anything.

NC and ND are proprietary licenses,
rewarding an individual for their labor.

NC and ND have nothing to do with a community
solution to the hostage scenario problem.
NC and ND are NOT open.


> 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,

GPL provides a distributed solution to the hostage
scenario stalemate. If you don't like GPL, but want
to work on a distributed solution, then use BSD or
MIT or some Public Domain license.

If you want to work on a individual solution to the statemate,
then All Rights Reserved is for you.

> 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.

Except ARR and FLOSS also happen to line up with the
two basic solutions to the problem. NC and ND don't.
Well, they do. NC and ND line up with ARR, with a
single individual proprietary solution, with a bone
thrown in to shift it slightly to the left.

Really, you can just apply the NC and ND licenses
to your software if you want. But there's no need
to make software-specific language to it because
that sort of language is usually added to protect
the freedom of something, which has to be licensed
away. NC and ND withold most of the rights and give
away only a tiny subset.

There is nothing needing protecting, because there
is no community that can be taken advantage of.

If you want to license your software for a distributed
solution, for a community solution,then you would probably
want to use something like GPL because it has a "source"
requirement, which is really important to a community
who wants to create derivatives.

There isn't any large community that is going to form
around your NC-ND works that needs protection.

> * Usage restrictions. Popular ones are:
>    * Not for commercial use
>    * Not for military use
>    * Not for porn use
>    * Not for safety-critical use

Uh, just about everyone has given up on use-restrictions
in their licenses. It's explained over at the OSD website.

> * Redistribution conditions. Popular ones:
>    * Not for resale
>    * Don't restrict the rights when passing on
>    * Allow modifications
>    * Attribution

These are already available in CC licences. in order:
NC
SA
SA and NC
BY

> * Source
>    * Give access to the sources
>    * Give access to sources of modifications

Source requirements are irrelevant to something being
distributed NC or ND. I don't understand what this has
to do with your application.

Greg