Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

I think you completely misunderstand me.

1) I've clarified my statement about ND and NC not being disliked in a previous post. Read that.

2) I've never, not even once, said that NC/ND is "half open" or anything like that. I just remarked that non-free licenses are more suitable for some projects and some developers.

On 4/25/07, Greg London <email AT greglondon.com> wrote:

> 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 license you use.

I cant add a BY clause to a GPL license, right?
And the entire problem was that the Creative Commons
recommend not using CC licenses for software.

> 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.

They did not  "sort out what Free meant". They just made a definition. Whether or not freeware is free depends entirely on the definition of free. Since the Free Software definition is universally accepted, people use tit, but that does not mean that it is a superior ideology. By the way, BY SA NC ND are different degrees of the same thing. All of them give away some freedoms but restrict others, like all licenses do. The difference is that

> 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.

This part of the quotation is irrelevant. The important part is about making it easy to mark creative work with the freedoms the creator wants.

> 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.

Freedoms and rights are the same thing. See Freedom of speech at wikipedia for example:
"Freedom of speech is the concept of the inherent  human right to voice one's opinion ..."

Anyway you can believe me when I say that I am very well aware of the FSFs definition of Free Software.

In the section you are commenting on, I am not trying to explain the difference between proprietary and free. I am complaining that there are no licenses between "all rights reserved" and Free Software. In particular, there is no standardized freeware license, by which I mean a license granting unlimited rights to copy, use and distribute the program. The reason I'm interested in those precise freedoms is that IMHO those are the freedoms the end users actually use.

-Björn Terelius