Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Gregory Maxwell" <gmaxwell AT gmail.com>]

On 10/2/07, Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
> Rant?
>
> Your overreaction to my post is a "rant". I simply presented a
> contrasting opinion. You said yourself that such practices were
> legally permissible.

I inadvertently omitted an "if" in my statement. I can see how my
error might confuse you. I intended to write "Even if things like this
are technically okay".

I ascribed motivations to the actions in my example. "in an attempt to
unfree code". Now, you often can't objectively measure motivations but
when you can it often makes things much easier.

In the case I was referring to the software was inoperable without the
cc-nc-nd data, and the redistributor specifically stated that their
intention was to be able to charge people who make commercial use of
the application. And if you believed their licensing argument they had
succeeded: the software is inoperable without the cc-nc-nd part.

> But then you claimed that it violated the
> spirit of the license.

The GPL has a preamble for a reason. The intention of the license is
abundantly clear.

You may be able to find a technical loophole in the permissions
granted in the GPL which allows you to claim that you can combine the
GPLed covered work with a differently licensed work in a manner which
removes the resulting derivative from the pool of freely licensed
works, but loopholes like this will be closed.

I was not attempting to comment about cases where your actions don't
result in the removal of a new version of the software from the pool
of freely licensed works because I didn't have anything to say about
that.  I was simply reminding people not to play license games to
escape the requirements of the GPL, and I'd only commented at all
because I had just run into to such a case.