Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com>]

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 10:27 AM, Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org> wrote:
> On 26/02/13 19:47, Kat Walsh wrote:
>> On balance, we think including it is the right decision. One of the
>> primary goals for us in the 4.0 process has been enabling greater
>> interoperability and compatibility with other works in the commons
>> (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0#Goals_and_objectives), and we
>> think that in light of that goal, it is important to include things
>> like a compatibility mechanism for BY-NC-SA even if it ends up unused.
>
> I don't think this is a good idea. If it's not going to be used, then it
> rilly doesn't need to be added. :-)
>
> With BY-SA, there are already existing copyleft licenses that BY-SA
> postdates. So compatibility there addresses an existing problem.
>
> With BY-NC-SA, legitimising (however fractionally) the creation of more
> such licenses is potentially creating new problems.

I understand, coming from perspective that NC-SA primarily confuses
would-be SA adopters (maybe; I know of some anecdotes), that anything
that would potentially fractionally "legitimise" NC-SA would be seen
as bad.

But I've come around to a different critique of NC, which is that it
has negligible market share amongst copyright holders who have zero
interest in free-as-in-freedom. As CC is not doing anything that could
theoretically address this in 4.0, it seems to be a responsible
license steward thing to do to leave possibility that someone else
might come up with a conceivably similar in spirit instrument that
does during 4.0's very, very long tenure as the current set of CC
licenses.

Mike