Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Rob Myers wrote:
> Software is a tool. People shouldn't be fooled by the existence of 
> written source code or the legal bodge that declares this a literary 
> work. 

Well, yeah, most of the time.

But there are software applications which are less "tool-like" or which
are tools, but are so specialized that you don't care if you can't "use
it to open paint tins". In these niche applications, NC or ND licenses
might find a market, e.g.:

"play once" games (puzzles) -
        It's hard to justify long term development because the
        value is recouped over a short time by many people (or
        else there are "spoilers" and it's not as valuable to
        most of the market). In such cases, the effort to develop
        and then get paid through per-copy sales makes sense,
        as does a secretive pre-release and a rapid release.

tax and other legal software
        The tax code changes every year, so long term development
        is not feasible. Furthermore, the government may wish
        to reduce non-compliant returns by controlling which
        software may be used through crypto-keys and the like, so
        you may have to buy a license to release software of this
        type.

There are probably other examples, which I'm not going to brainstorm
about -- I have no desire to write NC/ND software.

But then, the obvious question is "Why do you need source?" Neither
of these applications is going to get any boost from community
development, nor is community knowledge of the source code beneficial to
the community.

Also, of course, the game might've been divided into "engine" and
"content" components, allowing it to benefit from community-based engine
design. This is actually not a bad business strategy: create a free
platform which has community-developed games, then sell bigger-budget
proprietary games that run on it. Pretty much everybody wins in that
scenario: the company makes money and reduces engine development costs,
the community gets a well-written and tested game engine, players get a
variety of free games and some high-quality commercial ones as well (so
if -- as I personally theorize -- community and proprietary developed
games have different strengths then the players get all of them).

But, as I've said, CC-NC and CC-ND, used alongside existing free
software licenses like GPL and BSD/MIT/Expat (whatever) licenses provide
all the tools you need for those models.

And IMHO, if you aren't a shrewd enough business person to figure that
out from the existing materials on these licenses, then you don't have
any business trying these kinds of tricky strategies:

Far more people would suffer from accidentally using By-SA for software
than would benefit from using NC/ND for it. And if you want a more
nuanced position than 'CC licenses are bad for software' -- well, you
can ask here.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com