Re: [ipcommons] Using CC for Software?

joseph,
the aim on this round was not to get into the proliferation game, by
creating our own licenses. I am eager, however, that we do develop marks for
standard licenses -- GPL, apache, etc. Then we're just expressing other
standard licenses, and increasing the pressure towards convergence. That is
certainly in our near-term plans.

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> From: Joseph Reagle <reagle@MIT.EDU>
> Organization: MIT
> Reply-To: ipcommons@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Tue, 21 May 2002 12:34:31 -0400
> To: feedback@creativecommons.org
> Cc: www-archive@w3.org, ipcommons@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [ipcommons] 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/
> 
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Received on Thursday, 23 May 2002 14:46:03 UTC