Which DUAL Licence should I choose.

Mike Linksvayer ml at gondwanaland.com
Mon Aug 8 20:22:32 UTC 2011


On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 11:18, Tzeng, Nigel H. <Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu>wrote:

> While charging for software products may not be the only way to make money
> on software, it is a/the dominant one and highly effective.  There is also
> middle ground between proprietary and F/LOSS.  OSI can concede that
> territory or not but CC has elected to embrace it and I think to good
> benefit to their commons even with some legal nebulosity of the NC clause.
>

Has already been said on this thread, but worth stressing that CC has not
elected to embrace a middle ground when it comes to software.

CC has embraced a bit of a middle ground for non-software, but it isn't
clear whether that has been a good thing for the commons. Lots of people
think it is the biggest mistake CC has made. Even CC (where I currently
work) spends lots of time steering people away from NC and ND (no
derivatives) licenses where public benefit is primary and/or use by business
necessary.

There is a reasonable argument for NC in some domains (eg music, where fear
and irrationality rules, and the main threat to the world is locking down
the net to prevent filesharing, which CC NC licenses permit), but it seems
to me the case against NC is even stronger in software than in the fields in
which CC routinely argues against its use (eg education, government,
scientific communication). Ben Tilly explained one of the reasons succinctly
earlier in this thread. I wrote a bit about this in
http://p2pfoundation.net/Free_Culture_in_Relation_to_Software_Freedom

Anyway, the reason CC steadfastly refuses to condone using CC licenses for
software is not really that a license that covers both software and
non-software is inconceivable -- familiar language would be/have been easy
to add in a version -- but that use of CC licenses for software is bad for
the commons, both because NC and ND for software are harmful, and because no
CC license is clearly GPL-compatible. The exception that proves the rule is
the CC0 public domain dedication, which is GPL-compatible and with the FSF
we recently recommended for software if public domain is the intention.

You might note that the NC clause doesn't cause much conceptual confusion
> in the CC world.
>

If only that were true.
http://blog.ninapaley.com/2010/10/20/creative-commons-branding-confusion/ is
hyperbolic and I don't agree with all of it, but it does dispute above. :-)


> I do wish we could as easily choose from a full spectrum of licenses as
> they do and have plain english explanations of our rights and
> responsibilities under those terms.  As another benefit the CC doesn't
> have a problem with license proliferation that we do and their license
> interaction complexities appear no worse than ours.


CC license interaction complexities might be better, but not always in a
good way -- the incompatibilities between libre, NC, and ND licenses are
intentional, black and white, unresolvable, except via people abandoning NC
and ND. That said, CC has mostly been a force for anti-proliferation within
the non-software space. I recently had a look at the many pre-CC (pre-2002)
licenses, almost none of which are now used much, and none unambiguously
compatible with any of the others. Unfortunately proliferation seems to be
on the rise, though not of the intentional, unresolvable sort (eg due to
governments rolling their own licenses). I hope that CC can learn a bit from
the FLOSS world in addressing that kind of proliferation; some more on that
at http://share-psi.eu/papers/CreativeCommons.pdf

Mike
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