Daniel Mayer (maveric149) wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Mav's position, as he is stating it, is more extreme (and simply wrong IMO), since he is claiming (I believe) that a noncopyleft licence like CC-sa is not free to begin with.
If CC-sa = Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license, then I think you are confused (or at least made a typo).
Yeah, call it a typo. I had written CC-by-sa (the copyleft one) before, and then I meant to remove the letters that added the copyleft bit. This should have left me with CC-by (the free but not copyleft licence), but I removed the wrong letters. Sorry about that!
So mav can reasonably argue (along with the FSF) that a copyleft licence increases freedom overall, because it enforces freedom for derivative works. But it does not increase the freedom of the ''original'' document -- as even the FSF would agree -- and could only decrease ''that'' freedom.
Decrease that freedom? How when anything from a derivative work can be reincorporated back into the original? In what way does that decrease the freedom of the original document?
No, ''that'' doesn't decrease the freedom of the document -- it's other effects of the copyleft that do so.
I'll give a specific (albeit still hypothetical) example:
Suppose that there are two free documents that I like, one of which uses the GNU FDL licence, one of which uses CC-by-sa. I want to combine these two free documents into a single modified one. Even though both of them are supposed to be free, I can't do this! But if either of these documents uses the noncopyleft CC-by instead, then I am able to do what I want to do with the documents. The CC-by licence is more free; it gives me more freedoms.
This is not to say that I'm completely out of luck; CC and GNU are working more closely together, and Wikimedia may well yet put the pressure on RMS that's needed to make the GNU FDL compatible with CC-by-sa. But right now, the fact remains that I have more freedom -- more ability to modify a document that I rightfully possess -- if that document uses the noncopyleft CC-by licence.
That said, it may still be true that the world is more free in the end if the documents use the copyleft licences -- that all depends on whether they would be coopted by proprietary writers if they're CC-by. But the documents themselves are still less free if they're copyleft.
-- Toby