[Foundation-l] Fwd: [cc-licenses] The FSF On FDL Derivatives

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 5/9/07, Brock Weller <brock.weller at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is just an interpretation guys,

No. It isn't. It's an statement about the obvious, intended, and long
understood language of the license by the people who wrote it and have
the ability to revise it.  It's not a bad thing.

>no need to panic and remove license
> options.

Here we agree.

> I love the CC liscenses, my images are all under them, and
> furthermore,

I wonder if you actually understand the implications of the current CC
licenses? Some people have been rather surprised by them.

>I consider Lessig to be much, much smarter then anyone working
> at the FSF, especially Stallman and his holy crusade to rid the world of
> anything thats not a GNU license (except the LGPL, which also seems to have
> his ire).

It is funny that you say that, the FSF has been very friendly,
understanding, and accommodating towards us.

They understand that their mission and our mission isn't the same and
they have made extensive offers to be accommodating to our needs.
Enough that I and others have encourage them to move slowly and
carefully with us, because we are inexperienced and brash moves won't
help anyone.

Saying that Stallman is "on a holy crusade to rid the world of
anything thats not a GNU license" is inaccurate and unnecessarily
hypergolic.  RMS disapproves of some of the CC licenses, specifically
"developing nations" and "sampling+" because people are so often
confuse them for free licenses when they are darn-near all rights
reserved. He doesn't want them "rid", he just can't recommend a
Creative Commons license when there is chance that it will be
misunderstood as one of those.

The FSF distributes material released under a number of licenses which
are not authored by the FSF, for example the current GNU logo is under
the Free Art license.

We suffer through the problems created by this confusion on many of
our projects every day.

Amusingly, based on my discussions with all involved parties, we (as
in both our communities and the WMF) take a position on licensing
which is generally more restrictive than Mr. Stallman.  While RMS
agrees that useful material such as documentation, textbooks, and
encyclopedias should be under licenses which meet the Definition of
Free content, he still sees the use for licenses like cc-by-nc-sa.

Everyone I know who is actually involved with licensing discussions
has been considered, and fairly reasonable. Please don't embarrass us
all by coming off as a complete troll or drama queen.

These are complex and nuanced matters with serious long term
implications and plenty of opportunities for reasoned disagreement.
There is much potential for silly politics, self-promotion, and
errors... but only if we allow trolling and incivility to rule our
discussions.