Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Francesco Poli <invernomuto AT paranoici.org>]

On Sun, 1 Jan 2012 16:22:43 -0500 Anthony wrote:

> 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:
[...]
> >> 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.

I am afraid we will have to agree to disagree, then...  :-(

Anyway, I don't see why you seem to think that a clause allowing a
CC-by-sa → GPL conversion would be harmful.
It would just allow a work to be moved from a weaker copyleft to a
stronger one.

Do you see the source-availability requirement as a non-free
restriction? If you don't, you should have no problems with the
possibility to strengthen the copyleft that protects a work... 

> 
> > 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.

I think the spirit of Free Software is that authors should make life
for modifiers as easy as possible.

> 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.

Obviously, copyleft does not require authors to actively go around and
help recipients to modify their works!

But keeping their preferred form for making modifications secret and
unavailable is something that is against the spirit of Free Software.

The example of a book written in LaTeX is especially simple and clear.
Fixing a minor detail (such as a typo) is extraordinary easy, if you
have the LaTeX source code: just edit the LaTeX code and recompile!
Trying to do the same, when all you have is the PDF file generated by
pdflatex, is extremely unpractical: you may edit the PDF file directly
(say, with pdfedit), but the result won't be as "clean" as the
recompiled PDF file. Otherwise, you may reverse engineer a LaTeX code
that is able to re-generate a PDF file similar to the original, but the
result won't probably look consistent with the original (unless you are
a real LaTeX guru and invest a considerable amount of time in the
effort!).
Hence, distributing this PDF file under the terms of the CC-by-sa
license, without making LaTeX source available, is like saying:
"you *may* modify it, but, good luck, if you *actually* want to do so!"

[...]
> 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 are not talking about material objects.
We are talking about information that may be processed by computers.
 

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