Hi Peter,
Post by Peter Saint-AndreHi Arto!
Post by Arto BendikenIn case it's of interest, I'm engaged in an ongoing Identi.ca
conversation with Mike Linksvayer, the vice president of Creative
http://identi.ca/conversation/59986314
Well, it's hard to have much of a conversation in 140-character packets.
True.
Post by Peter Saint-AndrePerhaps a lengthier medium is in order? (One if by email, two if by blog?)
Yes; pending a reply from Mr. Linksvayer as to whether and how one
might get involved in any future Creative Commons discussions on
expanding their scope to cover software, I'll write this all up as a
blog post to make it easy to reference and comment on. I'd be glad if
you might deem it worth linking to from your blog which I suspect has
a rather larger audience.
Post by Peter Saint-AndrePost by Arto BendikenIn short, the folks at Creative Commons are aware of the Unlicense
initiative, and apparently supportive of it.
They have had discussions of expanding the scope of CC-Zero to cover
code,
Are they having such discussions about other CC licenses, or only Zero?
I don't know as yet. I would like to imagine that the uptake and
interest the Unlicense has enjoyed over the last year (as I'll need to
detail in a blog post soon; the project list on Unlicense.org is
woefully inadequate) has something to do with it, in which case it
would be specifically about CC0.
After all, broadly equivalent FLOSS license options (from the
permissive MIT/BSD all the way to copyleft GPL) *are* available for
all their other licensing instruments, but the Unlicense ultimately
exists because CC0 left a vacuum for it to exist, by not being
intended for software.
I'm not sure it was clear to anyone, including me, how large that
vacuum was; but by now, a year later, it's perfectly evident that
there's significant and widespread "market demand" for something like
the Unlicense, so it's understandable if they might be interested in
expanding the scope of CC0.
Post by Peter Saint-AndrePost by Arto Bendikenbut if that happens, Mr. Linksvayer sees that as complementary
to the Unlicense since both approaches are compatible and
interoperable, both being at base intended as explicit public domain
dedications and copyright waivers, not licenses per se - save as a
backup strategy for backwards jurisdictions.
Sounds about right.
Post by Arto BendikenIf the Unlicense and CC0 both become viable options for publishing
public-domain code, then the choice of which one to use becomes almost
just a question of personal brand preference: those more in the
mainstream might perhaps be expected to go with CC0, yet others (such
as many on this mailing list, no doubt) might still prefer the
explicit and strong "opt-out" subtext of the Unlicense.
I do think it's largely a matter of branding.
Not to criticize Creative Commons because I think they've done a great
job in many respects, but they have too many licenses ("this is
CC-licensed" "which one?" "oh I thought they were all the same"). And
given that CC0 is explicitly *not* a license, I think it muddies the
waters for them to have a license for the public domain (in fact they
have both CC0 and PD because as we know some jurisdictions don't accept
that you can put something directly into the public domain).
From a branding perspective, I really like the term "unlicense". Zero
sounds a bit negative ("it's got zero protection"), and public domain is
a mouthful (and not recognized everywhere). Naturally there's the
question of how you can license something under something called the
"unlicense", so perhaps there's a source of confusion there, too. :)
Yes, I do think that this specific confusion exists with regards to
both CC0 and the Unlicense. I am frequently chagrined to see people
say on Twitter or on blogs that they are thinking of "licensing
something under the Unlicense" or that they are "dual-licensing under
the Unlicense and XYZ".
On the other hand, that also goes to show why the Unlicense was so
sorely needed: even if (in certain arbitrary regions of North America,
at least) publishing something into the public domain is as simple as
saying you hereby do so, that still involved too much cognitive
dissonance for people deeply used (or indoctrinated, if you will) to a
"license-required" worldview.
"But everyone has a license file; hence I need a license file; what do
I put in it?" is but one of the many questions the Unlicense seeks to
answer for software projects.
Thus it's perhaps both inevitable and necessary that, at this
relatively early stage in the ongoing transition to a post-copyright
world, people do say contradictory or confused things like "licensing
something under the Unlicense".
Perhaps in another decade or so our common vocabulary will have sped
further past the road bump of licensing, so that the aforementioned
statement will be more widely recognized as nonsensical, with the very
name of initiatives like the Unlicense having helped drive that
change.
Post by Peter Saint-AndreIf anything, I'd like to think about what it would mean for the
unlicense to be expanded beyond code to texts and music and such.
Perhaps that's just CC0 under another name? If so, perhaps it does make
sense to merge the two concepts / "movements" in some way, but I think
that requires further thought and discussion.
I'm not at all opposed to that in principle, but it would need someone
(hint) to step up to drive it since I must admit to being rather less
of a polymath than certain others ;-)
Post by Peter Saint-AndreThat's just my gram of silver, for now. ;-)
In return, I offer you this most interesting and gratifying trend
graph, in case you haven't seen it yet:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=copyright,intellectual+property,patent,+open+source&year_start=1720&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3
--
Arto Bendiken | http://ar.to/