Development of Creative Commons licenses

[David Chart <bydosa AT davidchart.com>]

I don't think allowing conversion to the GPL is a good idea, and I don't 
think that GPL compatibility is possible.

On the philosophical point, if the GPL can already be used for any creative 
works, then there is no need for a CC license doing the same thing. The claim 
that a truly free work must come with the source is thus not relevant to the 
question of how the CC licenses should be revised. The argument must be that 
it is, in general terms, a good idea for CC-BY-SA works to be also licensable 
under the GPL.

I think it would be a bad idea to allow works currently licensed under 
CC-BY-SA to be relicensed under the GPL. The authors releasing those works 
could have released them under the GPL, but chose not to. Having CC change 
that decision for them without consultation would be politically dangerous, I 
fear; a lot of people would start suggesting that you can't trust the CC not 
to issue version 5.0 with a clause saying "Google can use this stuff however 
it likes under any licence". (Google promises not be evil, so that's OK, 
right?)

More practically, I don't think it's actually *possible* to distribute a wide 
range of BY-SA works under the GPL. 3.0 defines source code, and clause 6 
says that when you convey an object form (not the source), you must convey 
machine-readable Corresponding Source. For a fair number of works that BY-SA 
might be used for, the preferred form for modifications is not 
machine-readable. The GPL simply doesn't apply. The source must also be in a 
publicly-documented format with an available source code implementation. Even 
for electronic works, this is often not the case; artists who work in 
Photoshop, for example, cannot provide the preferred form for modifications 
in such a format, because the preferred form for modifications is a Photoshop 
file.

I also strongly doubt that you can get away with saying "whatever we have is 
the source code"; the language looks designed to exclude the binary blobs 
that come with some hardware. In that case, a conversion clause is 
meaningless; you cannot distribute under the terms of the GPL, because you 
cannot hold to those terms. (A conversion clause would provide no leverage to 
get the original creator to provide the source; if someone holds copyright, 
says that they are releasing something under the GPL, but fails to provide 
source, they have merely failed to release something under the GPL. Barring 
other contracts, they have no obligation to succeed.)

I can see that it is inconvenient for video games, and that the original 
intent of the artists almost certainly was for the images to be usable in any 
video game, but I don't think that problem should be solved by changing the 
license. Instead, you should get the works relicensed (should be no problem 
if the artists really did mean that), or rewrite the code so that you can use 
artwork released under a different license, even a non-free one. I'm well 
aware that neither of those, particularly the second, is a trivial task...

-- 
David Chart
http://www.davidchart.com/Blog/