[PD] a little ot: creative commons

[Marc Lavallée]

Le 15 Juin 2006 11:50, august a écrit :
> But, I'm not so sure the CC is not an ideological movement.  It's just
> that it's not as totalitarian as the FLOSS/GPL movement.

The FSF have a very strong position and is essential to this movement; the 
larger FLOSS "movement" basically want the source code and doesn't stand 
for much. The free software movement is setting the rules to ease and 
protect the development and use of free software, which includes being 
against proprietary software and restrictive about the way source code 
should be used, but it is not totalitarian.

Consider the description of "totalitarism" in Wikipedia: "Totalitarianism is 
a term employed by political scientists, especially those in the field of 
comparative politics, to describe modern regimes in which the state 
regulates nearly every aspect of public and private behavior". Free 
software is not a regime, and is not telling us what to do with source code 
in private. By comparaison, proprietary software is monopolistic, companies 
dont want us to know how their products are made, and they would like to 
know what we do in private with them, because it's their absolute property. 
The "content industry" is even worse...

> CC addresses the production of culture, the GPL address
> the production of code.   They are two very different intentions, two
> very different "things".

Yes. But not so different. The CC licenses (with "some rights reserved") are 
not like the GPL (or some other free license), because the "cultural 
industry" is not ready for the kind of freedom promoted by the FSF; this 
industry is being totalitarian because it was able, after centuries, to 
create such a restrictive context. The free software movement started at 
about the same time as the PC industry because it was threatening the 
freedom of programmers that were already sharing code.  The software 
industry is still young, so it's the right time to promote a favorable 
context to legally protect our computing freedom, hoping this will continue 
to inspire other types of human activities.

> And, despite being a FLOSS advocate and avid FLOSS programmer since many
> years, I take particular offense to this article:
>
> 	http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/Freedoms-Standard-Advanced
>
> Mako Hill only wishes to extend the naive tautology of the word
> "freedom", and knock CC for not having an ideology that is as simple and
> total as the GPL.

Exactly. But I understand the critic of the FSF about some CC licenses; for 
example, the "Developing Countries" license is a good example of a bad 
license with a good intention. The CC project should be careful, because if 
it evolves only as a collection of almost good and not so free licenses, it 
will loose its momentum. It's now the right time to promote cultural 
freedom, like 1984 was the right time to promote computing freedom.
-- 
Marc