On Nov 23, 2007 12:34 PM, Robert Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
Some of this is that I get very confused when I talk about Creative Commons licenses. You are talking about a specific license here, but that is IMHO one of the problems with this license.
Alright. Permit me to suggest that *now is the time to get things straight*. You are now in a fairly deadly serious conversation which turns on the terms and spirit of one and only one Creative Commons license, CC-BY-SA. All other CC licenses are irrelevant to this discussion, because nobody in their right mind familiar with the CC licenses would suggest that any other license was similar in spirit to the GFDL. To repeat, only CC-BY-SA is under discussion at this moment.
The terms of the CC-BY-SA license are at:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode
Please take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with them. A short summary can be found at:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
if you don't have the time to read the details in full.
I've known the Free Software Foundation, and RMS in particular, for some time now. I may not agree with everything that RMS stands for, but he and the FSF is generally predictable and RMS has been very consistent for some time on the fundamental issues of intellectual property freedom. I don't see the Free Software Foundation changing their licenses in a dramatic fashion to lose sight of that basic quest for Intellectual Property (software and the written word, but also trademarks and patents too) freedom. In this regard, I suppose I can say that I don't have the same level of trust with Creative Commons...even if other may put the same or more trust that Creative Commons on this front.
Very well.
However, consider the hypothetical where the FSF published the CC-BY-SA license *as the GFDL 2.0*, word-for-word. Would your trust in the FSF allow you to accept the FSF's trust in Creative Commons? There is negligible moral difference between that scenario and what is actually being discussed. Unless the talks break down (which they always might), a future version of the GFDL and the CC-BY-SA license will have identical or functionally identical texts. This will not require the FSF to change its principles one iota. Would you still be raising all these objections then?