Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com>]

On 04/28/2014 03:20 PM, Kat Walsh wrote:
> The minimum compatibility criteria currently do not preclude “vanity
> licenses” from being named compatible. (A “vanity license” is a
> license that is created even though no appreciable difference exists
> between it and an existing, established  license, and often includes
> some reference to its creator.) In the interest of not needlessly
> walling off the commons where compatibility of terms should exist, CC
> may approve these licenses as compatible. However, CC as a general
> matter does not recommend creation or use of these licenses. Because
> CC believes license proliferation is harmful to the commons, we may
> reconsider this policy if it increases license proliferation by
> encouraging others to create vanity licenses that may be deemed
> compatible.

One way to address this for BY-SA would be to require that prior to
consideration the candidate license be formally approved by
opendefinition.org or opensource.org both of which usually take an
amount of time approaching infinity (probably a feature) to approve
"vanity" licenses.

As there are no "standards" bodies that care enough about semi-open
licenses to approve their semi-openness, perhaps a "hybrid economy"
approach could be taken with BY-NC-SA: proposer of candidate license has
to pay US$100k or some other reasonable cost incurred for process. 1/2-)

Mike