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  • From: rob AT robmyers.org
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] CC strategic elements
  • Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 12:58:49 +0100

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.





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