Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Anthony <osm AT inbox.org>]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 6:22 AM, Francesco Poli
<invernomuto AT paranoici.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:08:30 -0500 Anthony wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 2:57 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org> 
>> wrote:
>> > One of the reasons some form of
>> > BY-SA->GPL compatibility is interesting is that some want
>> > source-requiring copyleft for non-software,
>
> I personally think that a work is not really Free, without source
> availability.

Okay, but not everyone who licensed their work under CC-BY-SA agrees with 
this.

In fact, it seems to me that the best solution for someone who
believes this, is to use GPL, and only GPL.

>> One of the advantages of CC-BY-SA compared to GPL is that it *doesn't*
>> have the sometimes onerous requirement to share source.
>
> I see that as a bug, rather than a feature.

Yes, I realize this.

Obviously I think you're wrong.

> When source (the preferred form of a work for making modifications to
> it) is not made available by the author, each recipient finds
> himself/herself in a position of (technical) disadvantage with respect
> to the author: the author has the possibility to make modifications
> that the recipient cannot make as easily.

True.

And acceptable.  Authors do not have a duty to help others make
modifications.  In fact, taken to its logical conclusion such a
requirement becomes absurd.  An author is pretty much always going to
have an easier time modifying his own software than others.

>> Something to keep in mind is that the "source" of a CC-BY-SA work (the
>> preferred form for making modifications) might in some cases be
>> thousands of times bigger than the non-source version of the work.
>
> In those cases, maybe that form is not really preferred over other
> smaller formats.

I'm talking about cases where that form *is* really preferred over
other smaller formats, though.

> Maybe even the upstream author prefers to keep the
> work in some other more "space-efficient" format.
> When this happens, the smaller format is the actual source (namely, the
> preferred form for making modifications)...

That's not what I'm talking about, though.  I'm talking about a case
where the "space-efficient" format is the work itself.  A map, a
graph, a chart, a jpeg.

> There may be some difficult corner cases, but please keep in mind that
> the definition of source proposed by the GNU GPL is often flexible
> enough to address most cases without problems.

I'm talking about a quite common case that I deal with all the time - maps.

If we want a less common case, what's the source for a sculpture?
What about that die-cast toy that I was talking about earlier?  We
have to make it as easy for the recipient of the toy to make
modifications as the original author, right?