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On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 12:38:48AM +0000, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
On Mon, Mar 17, 2003 at 07:01:05PM +0100, Wouter Vanden Hove wrote:
Last Fosdem the FSF gave the Free Software Award to Larry Lessig for the advancement of Free Software. But what is the official stance of the FSF's on the Creative Commons Share-Alike License?
I mailed FSF when Creative Commons was announced, asking if they'd publicly comment on it.
I got a reply saying that the goals were too different for them to comment. CC isn't for software.
(IANAL) Hmmm, not so sure about that - the GPL is my software license of choice, but there isn't all that much difference with CC's Share-Alike license. (http://creativecommons.org/license/results-one?partner=&exit%5furl=&...).
Lessig is a good man, he's worked along side FSF in the past, gave them $20,000 last year, and Stallman reads his work.
Lessig is one of my heroes - as is RMS - but I do think you're mixing up Lessig and Eben Moglen, the FSF legal council, who donated $20,000 to the FSF last year (http://digitalmass.boston.com/news/globe_tech/upgrade/2002/1125.html). Unless Lessig *also* gave them $20,000, of course :)
I reckon they'd give a project of his the thumbs up.
I'm pretty sure they do.
Shouldn't the Creative Commons be urged by the FSF's to include the GPL as their preferred copyleft software-license?
I agree that they should have a note somewhere about it.
Maybe Lessig sees simplicity as a main aim in making the CC system work. ...or maybe you should send the CC guys a mail to suggest it.
I think CC and the FSF are complementary in the way that CC is much more accessible to the masses. One can actually point non-programmers/non-lawyers/ copyright novices to their site and say 'choose a license' - which they will be able to do quite intuitively.
I've asked CC about dual-licensing things (GPL & their BY-SA license), and here is what they said:
Thanks for your questions. First off I am required to say that we are not lawyers and are not able to give legal advice, however I can give you my perspective on this. Ultimately you can do what you like, but I think you could run into problems if there are any conflicting terms in either of the licenses. However in the case of derivative works you can specify that the user has the option to use either one of the license, just make sure it's clearly written somewhere. Thanks for the note, we should put a more in depth FAQ on this.
So that is probably what I will do with the software I write. For non-software, I'll probably go for CC licenses with their pretty icons and straightforward definitions.
Bye for now, Ward.
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