Re: Using CC for Software?

Hi Joseph,

I'm metadata advisor to the Creative Commons, so I'll tell you some of 
what we're currently planning to do with RDF (plans may change, std. 
disclaimers, etc.) . I'm sure other members of the team can answer the 
other parts of your email.

On Tuesday, May 21, 2002, at 11:34  AM, Joseph Reagle wrote:
> 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.

Yes, one of the things we're working on is an RDF Schema for our 
licenses. It will be roughly like this:

work1 license license1 .
license1 requires copyleft, attribution, ... .
copyleft description "The license requires that each modified version of 
the work is ... " .

I'm hoping to expand the characteristics (like copyleft, etc.) so that 
we can describe other licenses like the GNU GPL or the EFF OAL. Building 
something like Zooko's Quick Reference[1] from the RDF data is an 
interesting place to go. So if one were to say that MIT-style licenses 
were those that only required attribution and no warranty, then they'd 
be easy to categorize.

[1] http://zooko.com/license_quick_ref.html

> 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.

Yep. While I doubt that our web site will be able to do that kind of 
thing, it should certainly lay the framework for others who are 
interested.

> 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?

Others can probably explain a little better why software was excluded. 
Reasons I've heard are:

  - a lot of work has already gone into software, and so we should focus 
on the more neglected stuff
  - software, by its nature of practicality, has a lot of issues that 
other content doesn't. When was the last time you bought a CD that had a 
shrinkwrap license disclaiming warranty?

Anyway, I hope this answers some of your questions. Thanks for your 
interest in the project and your letter.

All the best,
  - Aaron

Received on Tuesday, 21 May 2002 13:16:23 UTC