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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Unbundling the GPL

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Joachim Durchholz <jo AT durchholz.org>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Unbundling the GPL
  • Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:44:11 +0200

Greg London schrieb:
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.

Now that's overstating the case.

You *can* release NC and ND licensed stuff and to the public a service.
It's just less of a service than releasing it without the NC and ND burdening.

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.

I can understand that...

OTOH when I look at the GPL3 disagreements, I think a "less religious" approach would benefit many people.
And when I look at the spirit of the GPL, it's parallel to what CC tries to achieve - it's just more dogmatic. (Not that dogma is necessarily an evil: sometimes you need to polarize to achieve anything, and dogma and evangelization are good tools for that. It's just that I don't like to be drawn into this kind of struggle.)

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".

You say as if "proprietary" were a four-letter word.

Well, usually it is.
However, CC would give something new: a modular licensing kit.
This not only fits well with a programmer's mindset, it would also fit a need that hasn't been addressed yet (let me give another conjecture why this wasn't done yet: because programmers have an instinctive dislike of anything that has to do with lawyers).

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.

Agreed.
OTOH I think that the outcome was a muddied terminology.
Even today, the FSF finds it necessary to repeat that it is "free as in free speech, not free as in free beer" - if I find myself clearing up terminology on a regular basis, I should really revisit my terminology instead of trying to impose my personal terminology on the general public.

Sorry for the rant.
Just let me repeat that I share very much the FSF's goals, but I don't like their propaganda, and I even less wish to be associated with it, if only by GPLing my works...

... and for this discussion, let me state that there should be quite a number of people who think similarly. RMS and the FSF have been polarising, which means that there is a lot of people who'd jump ship if a viable alternative to the GPL existed. (I'm pretty sure that the GPL activists would throw a tantrum, of course, but I'm not sure that this would be bad for anybody.)

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.

Modifying an existing license is something that I wouldn't want to do without the help of an excellent lawyer with lots of international resources.
In other words, I'd do this kind of modification if Lawrence Lessing and his resources helped me with that :-)
... but not on my own. I'd not want to risk invalidating the license by tampering with something that I don't fully understand. This is simply too far outside my turf.

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.

I have yet to hear how wrong that would be.
I have read a lot of advocacy (and, of course, flamage by the usual bunch of half-knowledgeable converts), but nothing substantial that I could repeat to explain the issue to outsiders.

Do you have better resources? A URL would suffice.

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.

I can't remember anybody on this list talking about them as if they were the same.
Of course, company PR tends to muddy such distinctions.

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.

No. They simply established a definition of "Free" that met their intentions, so that they could use an extremely positive terminology to describe their goals.
It's just PR.

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.

Fully agreed.
It's just that unless somebody comes along and creates another set of modular licenses (certainly not me), we'll have to stick with the way CC does it.

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.

Right.

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

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

Right. (No pun intended.)

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.

I think that's too strong.

I see three important points in the spectrum here:
* Closed, i.e. "all rights reserved".
* Free use ("free beer", "freeware"). As in CC's ND clause.
* Modification allowed and possible. As in the GPL, or a CC without ND.

There are endless variations to the theme, of course, but these three are the key differences.

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 start exactly at the points where the others' rights end. So anything that's about managing rights is also about managing freedoms.

IOW "rights, not freedoms" is just a slogan, not an argument.

Regards,
Jo




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