Re: Proposal: License Change for Manual And Standardization of Licenses for Official Docs

[MJ Ray <..hidden..>]

Josh Berkus <..hidden..> wrote:
> MJ,
> > Creative Commons licenses are complicated and contain lawyerbombs -
> > things which are vague and/or confusing and/or CC has ignored requests
> > to explain.  I don't see the benefit over a BSD-style documentation
> > licence if that's what's wanted.
>
> Could you be a little more specific on this?  I've always found CC.org to be 
> very approachable, and their contributers *are* attorneys, so I would tend to 
> think they know what they're talking about.

They may know what they're talking about, but simply find it to their
strategic advantage not to share that knowledge with the community.

CC representatives and lists have ignored requests to clarify certain
aspects of the licence: one big topic is whether CC-by-3.0 allows
TPM/DRM or not.  There are other smaller unclarified topics, but they
are probably harder to find than the TPM/DRM one.

In general, it's hard to find out why CC does anything and how.  The
little snippets I have heard from Englishmen present at an iSummit are
rebutted very easily by CC's leaders, but never replaced with fuller
descriptions of what happened there.

> CC would have the advantage of being the most popular non-code set of 
> licenses, and thus help us on license compatibility more than any other.

How?  Many CC licences are mutually incompatible and the most popular
CC licences are for non-free-software, including anti-commercial or
anti-modification terms.  Don't most people think CC means "free for
non-commercial use" like BBC TV's Click show announced week-before-last?

Please use something simpler, like BSD-style.

Hope that explains,
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