Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

> Greg,
>
> Thank you for that beautiful barn building analogy.

Credit where credit is due, it isn't my analogy.
I'm not sure who was the first person to make
the comparison between FLOS projects and a
community barn raising, but it's been around
probably as long as FLOS has been around.
And of course, community barn raisings started
long before FLOS existed, so they get the original
credit.

> Your clarity about what is a marketing license
> and what is a gift license is exemplary.
> Non-commercial licenses are indeed marketing
> licenses that stifle the power of culture to
> take gifted work, grow it and to prosper and
> thrive doing so. It's a self promotional license,
> not a community promotional license.

You may want to read
"The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property".
http://www.amazon.com/Gift-Imagination-Erotic-Life-Property/dp/0394715195/

The whole book is a study of Gift Economies that
existed in cultures long before Free Software started.
The book starts out by explaining where the term
"Indian Giver" came from. The native americans
basically had a Gift Economy of physical objects,
such as a peace pipe or some token that they'd give
to the settlers to the new world. Their expectation
was that the Gift remained community property, and
that you'd hold it for a while, and then pass it on.
The Puritans could not fathom the idea, and created
the term "Indian Giver" to describe their actions
in a proprietary vocabulary. You give it to me, it's
mine.

For me, the book really clarified the distinction
between Market and Gift, and really showed me what
a Gift economy is about.

It also cemented the notion that between a Market economy
and a Gift economy, one isn't better than the other,
but they are completely different solutions to the same
problem.

So, when I point out the difference between CC-NC
and CC-SA, when I say CC-NC is Market and CC-SA is Gift,
it isn't to say that one is better than the other,
it is to say that they are completely different
approaches. The fact that CreativeCommons presents
all their licenses as all the same (or different
degrees of the same spectrum) has been a long-standing
frustration of mine.

If you're looking for more clarity on Gift economy
versus Market economy, "The Gift" is the book to
start with.

Greg