Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Joachim Durchholz <jo AT durchholz.org>]

Terry Hancock schrieb:
> In fact, I think it'd be an intriguing idea to reword the licenses (or
> their names, anyway) in terms of freedoms granted rather than rights
> retained. This is especially sensible if you intend to change the
> presentation to use the word "freedom", e.g.:
>
> 1) The Freedom to share copies of the work  (all the main CC licenses)
> 2) The Freedom to modify the work (all non-ND, now "D" for "derivative")
> 3) The Freedom to use the work commercially (all non-NC, now "C" for
> "commercializable")
> 4) The Freedom to reduce the freedom of the work (all non-SA, now "H"
> for "hijackable" :-) )
> 5) The Freedom not to credit the author of the work (no v2.0+ CC
> licenses? now "P" for "plagiarizable" :-P )

Sounds *very* good.
Might also shift the balance in favor of the less restrictive licenses.

> Even the FSF habit of dissing the "zero cost" meaning of "free" is
> pretty disingenuous, since it does indeed refer to "freedom". For anyone
> who's ever been poor, it should be personally obvious that "cost" is
> indeed a significant restriction, and I feel pretty defensive every time
> someone makes that snarky comment about "talking about freedom, not
> cost". Zero per-copy cost IS a significant freedom, whether it's the
> most important or not.

Excellent point.
I think that's one of the main selling points (well, not really *g*) of 
GPL software. It wouldn't be so successful in South America or Asia if 
it had a price tag.
The ability to inspect the source code is extremely important, too. 
Otherwise, people would be wondering how much NSA code they'd be using.
The ability to modify is also important. Though if Linux were under an 
ND license, people probably wouldn't care too much if they were 
reasonably sure that their patches would get integrated eventually. 
Actually that's the way that most people use Linux anyway...

Regards,
Jo