[Foundation-l] Licenses' biodiversity : my big disagreement with the Wikimedia usability initiative's software specifications

[David Gerard]

On 19 February 2011 10:41, Teofilo <teofilowiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> Maximising reusability is not the same as maximising usability.


This is a nice-sounding phrase, but its meaning is entirely unclear.

And maximising usability would mean rationalising the list of licenses
anyway. Paralysis of choice is actually bad interface design.


> If you open your eyes a little bit,


This phrase is heuristically a good indicator of a conspiracy theorist.


> you'll see that Creative Commons
> licenses are not the absolute legal chef d'œuvres people would like to
> believe they are. There are some good things in them, but they have
> some weaknesses.


I don't think anyone questions that.

However, they have one important advantage: they're really common and
they observably work.

You're positing an imaginary ideal world against a functional existing one.


> They are not even... free per the definition of Free works at
> http://freedomdefined.org/Definition/1.0 because they don't contain
> any open source requirement ("Availability of source data"). This is
> different from the GFDL which, more fortunately contains the
> "transparent copies" requirement. You don't find any "transparent
> copies" requirement in Creative Commons licenses.


I think you could be the only person on the face of the planet to try
to argue that CC by-sa isn't a free content licence.


- d.