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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] CC strategic elements

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Joachim Durchholz <jo AT durchholz.org>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] CC strategic elements
  • Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 15:22:33 +0200

rob AT robmyers.org schrieb:
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

OK, then CC is already moving to the right direction.

> and making the Wiki and Share Music
licenses just badges for standard licenses.

That's better than having special licenses.
I'd still suggest sticking with the standard licenses. Remembering the meaning of BY-SA is easier than having to remember that WIKI is an alias for BY-SA.
I also don't quite see what purpose aliases would serve.

> I think the badges are
retained so URLs don't break and there is an upgrade path for users of those badges/licenses.

It's OK to keep them for compatibility reasons.
However, they are still on the page where people select a license.
I think the aliases should be removed from there.

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.

Exactly.
I don't think it is possible to have a consensus. There are good reasons to go either way.
CC should decide on a specific level of quantization and communicate that. E.g. a statement like this: "We'll never offer more than five different license elements, so potential licensees will be able to remember them by heart and be able to immediately identify the licensing for any given work under a CC license."
After that, anybody who argues for an additional license will also have to argue what existing license should be made obsolete. That should reign in the natural drive to create additional licenses.

The limit of five above is just an example, it could equally well be three or six.
The maximum number of licenses in active use probably should never exceed seven, that's the number of concepts an average human can keep active in one's mind; in practice, CC's limit should probably be less because (a) not everybody has average mental capacity and (b) there are always some deprecated licenses floating around.

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.

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.

OK, stuff the "strategic decision" part.
The rest of the above stands though: since the FSF licenses don't have anything like ND or NC, i.e. *not* offering a "compromise license", people trying to tread a middle ground were forced to either go farther than they initially wanted, or not use an FSF license at all.

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.

Probably not from RMS' point of view.
From my view: yes, there are situations where it does make sense.
Think software giveaways for marketing purposes. That's a perfectly legitimate thing to do (even RMS might agree with that, if I read some of his more recent statements correctly), yet the FSF doesn't offer a good license for that.

This kind of polarization might have been the Right Thing to do for the FSF, I don't know.
I *would* like to see a world where there were a license for such cases. It would not make the software free in the FSF sense, but with a clear license that covers this case, everybody would immediately see it and know what to make of it.
Currently, too many companies make up their own licenses and suggestively applying labels such as "Share", "Free", or "Open", and the FSF is forced to set the matter straight whenever this happens.

I'm not sure what CC's position is.

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.

Possibly not ND.
Still, there's a proliferation of Open licenses. If the GPL had served the purposes of a wider audience, we'd have less of them.

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.

Probably because they don't trust Microsoft's intentions. (I certainly wouldn't, and wouldn't want to be associated with MS even by stealing their legal language!)
The license language may also have made it unsuitable for use by anybody but MS.
Third, the license is under Microsoft's copyright. I don't think I could legally use it.

Regards,
Jo




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