Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab AT web.de>]

Am Dienstag, 6. Mai 2014, 17:38:38 schrieb Rob Myers:
> It certainly doesn't lead to a less fragmented commons.

It leads to a lesser degree of fragmentation, because it creates 
possibilities for cooperation which did not exist before.

Please assume for a moment, that you created a set of photos which have a 
common theme and released them under BY-SA and that I am a writer who writes 
a book with that theme and I released my book under GPL, because I could not 
ensure copyleft of the design-files otherwise.

I see a photo from your set which I want to use, but there is a small problem 
I need to fix. Now I have two choices: I can release the changed version 
under cc by-sa or I can release it under the GPL. In the first case, I can 
simply send the new version back to you, in the second it is unlikely that 
you would accept it.

What can and likely will happen at some point is that you find some other 
problems in your image-files and fix them. If I sent the improved version 
back to you, I can now directly adopt your version and benefit from your fix. 
If I did not send the improved version to you, I have to get your new version 
and apply my own improvements again - or accept that I do not benefit from 
the quality-improvement in your image-files.

And since cc by-sa is much more convenient for most art than the GPL, artists 
are more likely to contribute to your photos under cc by-sa than to the ones 
under GPL.

This is the reason why most attempts to fork a BSD-project under the GPL were 
abysmal failures: Most contributors in the project did not follow and 
merge-conflicts killed the project in the end. This is also one of the 
reasons why Linus can maintain a strong grip over Linux: The only way to get 
all the future improvements into your code is to contribute it to the 
Linux-version which Linus maintains. Otherwise you quickly find yourself in 
merge-conflict hell and will have to abandon your changes at some point.

So it is more beneficial for me to just leave your photos under cc by-sa and 
only apply the one-way compatibility when I assemble a product which requires 
the GPL to have real copyleft. 

I trust in the self-interest of people, so I think most will do the same.

> Should CC just deprecate BY-SA and declare the GPL to be version 5?
> 
> If not, why not? Which of the objectives for compatibility would not be
> achieved by this?

It should not: The GPL brings huge practical hassles for stuff like 
multitrack recordings and graphical art. If you run a project which needs the 
GPL to have real copyleft, then you already have most of the infrastructure 
for dealing with that (versioned dependencies, build systems, 
asset-repositories and so forth), but if you do not, then releasing under the 
GPL requires quite some effort.

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

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