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

[Teofilo]

2011/2/18 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> On 18 February 2011 13:41, Teofilo <teofilowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Having a choice of possible licenses is a richness. Because specific
>> licenses might be more suitable to some specific needs than other
>> licenses. Because they don't offer the same sort of protection in a
>> variety of circumstances. Destroying licenses looks as bad as
>> destroying biological species. Biodiversity is needed.
>
>
> No, I think you're dead wrong there. Gratuitous licence proliferation
> is bad because it reduces interoperability and hence reusability. This
> has been observed repeatedly in the world of open source software; for
> you to claim that a proliferation of incompatible licences is a good
> thing in the world of free content, you would need to supply more than
> the mere assertions you provide here. Anything more than a continuum
> of PD <-> CC-by (equiv) <-> CC-by-sa needs *very good* justification.
> Steering people to one of those three by preferences is absolutely the
> right thing to do as it maximises reusability.

Maximising reusability is not the same as maximising usability.

If you open your eyes a little bit, 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.

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.