Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab AT web.de>]

Am Sonntag, 8. April 2012, 11:20:41 schrieb antoine moreau:
> "When I approached the FSF about my experiments, at first they were
> completely opposed to it. Richard Stallman told me that there was no
> reason anyone should copyleft non-software works. He felt that way even
> about software documentation! This was really the reaction from the
> entire « free software »

That’s quite some time ago, and I think they mostly realized now, that the
freedoms they defined for software are something people crave for all parts of
their lives. They accept now that their freedoms have a huge appeal outside
the limits of software, too.

Actually I think many old free software programmers just don’t understand
creative works - or rather don’t consider them as important - and don’t see
non-freedom in creative works as limiting as non-freedom in software.

I disagreed with that from the start, so I applaud you for doing pioneer work
in free culture!

I’ve been using the GPL for my own website and a roleplaying system since the
GPLv3 was published (since that made the language more general, so it could
more easily be mapped to non-software), and Battle for Wesnoth has been
publishing everything under GPL since 2003, from program code over artwork and
music to storylines, campaigns and user-content - and it’s a huge success.

So this works very well, when it is done by a project which cares about source
code. The only problem I see is with artists, who just want to release stuff,
because in the case of wesnoth as well as for my own releases this is backed
by version tracking systems which make source releasing trivial. And the
project defines the preferred form of modification very clearly as “what other
contributors will use” - which naturally is the form of work the project got
from the artist.

Conversely nothing would change for these projects, if the artists released
under cc by-sa, but cc by-sa would be one-way compatible to the GPL. Except
that they could suddenly use much more artwork.

But for the artists it would mean that they would have a safe license to
publish their stuff outside the project in a way which does not create a
burden for them but is legally safe - and easily usable by all copyleft
projects.

Best wishes,
Arne
--
Ich hab' nichts zu verbergen – hab ich gedacht:

- http://draketo.de/licht/lieder/ich-hab-nichts-zu-verbergen

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