Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Andrew Rens <andrewrens AT gmail.com>]

Hi Francesco

I've certainly heard various claims from members of disparate software communities purporting to define "free" before. I am not entirely unsympathetic to those claims.

But I am also from country in which the history of freedom cannot be separated from the struggle for dignity, a country in which colonial and neo-colonial oppression by the West has often taken the form of dictating to Africans what constitutes freedom. 

So I am not convinced that of an account of freedom that defines it in such a way that people must bind themselves not to assert the simple dignity of repudiating misrepresentations of their own expressions while still allowing those others to re-use their communications is either the only possible account or the most desirable account of freedom.

I am sure that many people reluctant to adopt Free Software licenses, may be convinced to adopt a given license, when non-free restrictions are added to that given license. I don't think that this should be a reason to add those non-free restrictions to a given license, though.

But neither the Free Software Foundation nor the Debian community regard this particular feature as not free, although as I've suggested  their account of freedom is not definitive for many of us who believe in knowledge freedom.

I think the goal of CC-by and CC-by-sa should be to let the works
licensed under their terms be Free works.
Popularity of the license should not be a goal in itself and at all
costs...

Here the "cost" is that those who are given the freedom to make derivatives may possibly have to remove attribution on request when the Licensor is believes that attribution of the remix is harmful to him. That is not a particularly high "cost" if you believe in the account of freedom that you've suggested.

However as I've pointed out there are other accounts of freedom in which the ability to protect one's dignity in respect of one's own work are a necessary core component of such freedom.

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Andrew Rens

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