[WikiEN-l] cc-by-nw (Encyclopedia of Earth)

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

I have to wonder whether the combinatorial plethora of creative  
commons licenses is a problem of some kind.

Believe it or not, I didn't figure out until yesterday that the  
license names are strings of two-letter tokens identifying modular  
characteristics of the license. All this time, I had been reading  
"by," not as an indicator, but as a preposition... I kept thinking it  
was something like "by" as in "when the wind is north-by-northwest, I  
can tell a hawk from a handsaw," or "passed by reference," or "two-by- 
four."

The general public doesn't understand the concept of a free license  
to begin with, how are they ever going to understand the zoo of  
possible licenses and what can and can't be done with them?