Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Joachim Durchholz <jo AT durchholz.org>]

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