Using CC for Software?

The application I've been interested in is the ability to help mitigate the 
problem of a proliferation of some open source software licenses. OSI [1] 
is being asked to approve more licenses than it can evidently handle. Many 
of the licenses differ with respect to the owner, and trivial and 
substantive variances. It would be interesting if a vocabulary/template 
could be constructed that genercized the form of the license (e.g., MIT 
type, GPL type, IBM type without the organization listed so others can use 
it without ceding ownership of copyright), eliminated trivial variances, 
and permitted the easy combination/categorization of content. For instance, 
in package management formats (e.g., Debian) they try to maintain a 
difference between "free" and "non-free" in the FSF sense. Or, the Linux 
kernel now looks for similar "free" terms in the modules it loads. Giving 
someone the ability to say "I want the software to be OSI compliant, GPL 
compatible, with ownership of 'me' with a W3C type style terms" would be 
nifty. And then subsequent packages and derivative works could combine 
constituents parts more transparently. This also applies to human readable 
content, particularly multi-media content.

I'm not sure if this intersects with the intent of CC, I've been awaiting 
some draft specification or examples to get a sense of direction. However, 
in reviewing the new public site [1] (nicely done!) it states, "Giving 
License to Creativity: Our initial goal is to provide an easy way for 
people (like scholars, musicians, filmmakers, and authors--from 
world-renowned professionals to garage-based amateurs) to announce that 
their works are available for copying, modification, and  redistribution." 
and "Unlike the GPL, Creative Commons licenses will not be designed for 
software, but rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, 
scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc." [2] 
Consequently, I suppose I now have the answer. However, I'm also wondering 
why software was excluded, and whether the goal of CC to arrive at a 
*single* license, or a framework for multiple licenses with a few core 
one's defined?

Thanks!


[1] http://www.creativecommons.org/
[2] http://www.creativecommons.org/aboutus/

Received on Tuesday, 21 May 2002 12:34:32 UTC