Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On 4/25/07, drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com> wrote:

On Wednesday 25 April 2007 06:15 am, Björn Terelius wrote:
> Lets try to keep the discussion constructive. I'll try to summarize the
> main topics so far.
>
> The ordinary CC license does a good job in giving artists an easy way of
> choosing licensing conditions for their creations. At present the options
> are BY, SA, ND and NC, and there does not seem to be any strong dislike of
> these options when applied to content.

Just for the record, I, at least, have a strong dislike for ND and NC when
applied to content. Possibly because it is done so under a "creative commons"
banner, possibly for the issues I have with copyright as currently practiced
in general, possibly for both reasons and even possibly for even as yet
undiscovered reasons.

So, it is not fair to say that there is no strong dislikefor NC and ND. It
could be more like not wanting to fight that fight at this time. (Not the
words I really want, but I can't seem to find them this morning.)

Ok, sorry. I, too, seem to have trouble finding the right words. :-) I know that some individuals dislike the NC and ND even for content. What I meant was that, as far as I can tell, the general opinion on this list and the official opinion of CC is that both NC and ND are alright and have their uses in some cases. The point I wanted to make was that when ND and NC in general has been debated on this list, there has been at least as many people supporting it, so NC and ND in general should not be brought into the debate at the moment. If we started to question the policy of the creative commons we would never get anywhere.

> As Joachim Durchholz pointed out,
> the Creative Commons discourages all use of the licenses when applied to
> software, because they were not written with software in mind.

Would it be good enough for you if CC said that ND and NC-ND were "safe" for
software though not "recommended" for such?

Certainly!  I have no problems with the CC recommending programmers to use the GPL or some other free license over a mere freeware one. That way, the programmer could choose ND if he really wanted to, but stay with GPL if he doesn't care. Of course, not only would CC have to say that ND and ND-NC are safe, but they must also be safe.

> The GPL and
> LGPL may be considered roughly equivalent to BY-SA and BY respectively (but
> I would contest this, as the GPL does not have any clear BY clause). This
> leaves the NC and ND options.

Possibly because the BY clause is too much like the advertising clause of the
original BSD licenses?

Still, don't you think that an artist should have the right to be properly credited for his work if others use it? If I spend half a year writing a program and decide to release it as free and open source, then I sure wouldn't want someone to just change the title and a do couple of minor changes in the GUI and then release my work under their own name, or even worse, attempt to sell it.