Development of Creative Commons licenses

[rob AT robmyers.org]

Quoting Joachim Durchholz <jo AT durchholz.org>:

> The recent proliferation of special
> licenses for specific kinds of works just means that I won't know what a
> license is anymore.

CC have been very good about non-proliferation, reducing the number of  
different licences with V2 and making the Wiki and Share Music  
licenses just badges for standard licenses. I think the badges are  
retained so URLs don't break and there is an upgrade path for users of  
those badges/licenses.

> The strategy itself seems to have consent, but there is dispute about
> how fine-grained the quantization should be.

Some people would like to see fewer quanta or the quanta modified to  
better fit existing ways of working.

But more quanta means more incompatibility which is bad.

> The third element is offering licenses that aren't really Commons
> licenses but that give those who wish to try the CC licenses some
> intermediate steps.

I am not aware of a noticeable trend of people graduating to freer  
licenses from NC/ND. This is a shame as the possibility of this used  
to be one of the arguments that I used to defend NC/ND.

> This part of the strategy is controversial. The ND clause if far too
> popular for the taste of many, including Lawrence Lessing himself.
> There's also the example of the FSF that has made the strategic decision
> not to offer an ND variant of the GPL, forcing the users of its licenses
> to make a clear decision.

The FSF didn't "make the strategic decision of not offering an ND  
version of the GPL". The practical goal of the FSF is to support  
software freedom. ND does not support this goal. The GPL is designed  
to practically represent Stallman's ethics of Freedom, of which ND  
most certainly isn't a part.

An ND GPL would have worked directly against both the FSF's practical  
goals and Stallman's ethics. So not producing one cannot be called a  
"strategic" decision, unlike the "mere aggregation" clause and the  
fact that copyleft takes effect on publication. It is not possible  
that the FSF might have considered making an ND GPL. This was not a  
missed opportunity.

> On the minus side, this strategy has prevented the FSF from creating a
> license for those cases where ND would have been legitimate,

This presupposes that there are legitimate cases for ND software,  
which has not been established. Some of the arguments about medical  
devices and the GPL-3 drafts are interesting but I think they're being  
resolved.

> polarizing
> the programmer community into those that are "pro" and "contra" and
> preventing an unideological discourse.

There isn't a "contra" community that wishes the FSF had produced an  
ND GPL. Within Free Software (by any definition: FSD/DFSG/OSD) there  
cannot be. There is no such controversy to be created within Free  
Software.

The desire for ND software is ideological. Since the discussion of ND  
and ~ND is a discussion of ideologies, there is no unideological  
discourse to be had here.

There is already an ND license available for software (MS-RL).  
Microsoft wrote it. I don't understand why people who want an ND  
software license from a well known organization don't just use this.  
Microsoft's lawyers are not exactly amateurs. And using an existing  
license reduces proliferation.

- Rob.