Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> 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.

Sure there is. There has always been a contingent of
folks who don't like CC putting out NC and ND style
licenses alongside SA and BY licenses and presenting
them as if they are all one big happy family of license
options.

I had issue when CC first came out with their name
being Creative --Commons-- while they were offering
completely non-commons style licenses. CC's initial
website from years ago had pictures of cows grazing
in a commons, talked about a commons, and never
distinguished teh fact that NC and ND are NOT
common's-style licenses.

They fixed their website, but the name had already
been launched, and they weren't willing to change it,
so we're stuck with that. And ever since, every once
in a while, some completely uninitiated person comes
along, and thinks that NC and ND have something to do
with doing something for the community. They don't.

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.

That was partly because CC didn't want to step on
the toes of a lot of organizations who had come to
the party years before they showed up.

It's also partly because those software communities
get the distinction between community licenses (SA,BY)
and proprietary licenses (NC,ND). And they didn't want
CC barging in, muddying the water with proprietary
licenses, encouraging people to use them on software
projects, and doing so with a name like "Creative COMMONS".

Most of the software organizations had fought for a long
time over what was "free" and what was not. And they
want CC to screw up the software communities by reseting
that discussion back to square one.

I remember debates about whether "Freeware" was free
or not. Whether "Shareware" actually shared anything.
Whether NonCommercial use only licenses were of any
value. And they all happened years and years before
CC came to the party.



> 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.

I don't understand this logic at all.
If Attribution is what you want, then
add -BY to whatever licese you use.




> Even though Free Software has proven itself to be
> very useful in many cases, we've had some examples
> of cases where it is not the ideal terms for licensing,
> but where a license with options like BY,SA,ND,NC would do
> the trick.

Yes, there are community projects and proprietary projects.
Some projects, by the natur of the problem they are trying
to solve, are proprietary.

But NC and ND are proprietary licenses. They are for the
primary benefit of the creator. And when people talk about
GNU-GPL and NC-ND as if they were all part of the same
thing, when people say they want to use NC because it is

"half-open"

then people who've been around and know the difference
are going to be telling you just how wrong you are.

You want to use a CC license for a proprietary project,
then I say go for it. Use NC or ND. Just don't kid yourself
that you're doing anything that's "half open". NC and ND
are proprietary licenses.

They have the potential to create Free Advertising and
Free Samples for the benefit of the creator. They give
away an insufficient amount of rights for a community
to form around the work and do anything that is for the
benefit of the community.

They are not Half-Open or Half-FLOSS.
They are "mostly proprietary".
You want to use them as such, fine. go for it.
Just don't talk about them as if they are the same
to people who know the difference.


> Some people have also voiced fear of a political backlash
> if CC endorsed the use of software licenses. Please explain.

See above. the floss software folks had spent years fighting
over and eventually sorting out what "Free" meant.
Then CC comes in with NC, ND, SA, BY licenses all under the
"Some Rights Reserved" banner as if all the licenses are
different degrees of the same thing. They're not.


> Let me quote the cc.org homepage:
> 'Creative Commons provides free tools

That is 'free' as in 'free beer'. Not free as in speech.
The licenses can be used at no cost to you.

> that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators
> easily mark their creative work with the freedoms

Hm. That probably needs to get changed to "rights".

> all major software licenses are either completely Free or
> proprietary ("All right reserved"). IMHO I think it would be great if
> programmers, too, could easily mark their creative work with the freedoms
> THEY want it to carry.

You had it right the first time. All licenses are either
some flavor of proprietary or some flavor of free.
That you invoke "the freedoms THEY want it to carry"
reinforces my impression that you think NC and ND have
anything to do with "Free as in speech".

NC and ND manage rights. Not freedoms.