[AktiviX-discuss] brief (read: quick) summary of license debate

[mp at fsc.cc]

Quoting Max Gastone <banangling at yahoo.com>:

> Why cant we not simply introduce an ethical clause to the licenses,
> or am I missing something here?

That, of course, is possible.

> It seems to being assumed that we
> have to use a license someone else has created.

Yes, that is true and good thing that you bring it up!
A good reason for choosing a license that is amde by others is that in doing so
you join a community. This gives you the comfort of sharing it with others - in
case your license is breached or contested in court for whatever reasons you
have a whole community behind you. AktiviX has no capacity to go to court with
some company, but the Creative Commons does. And they will wish to get engaged,
because of our use of their license is ruled out i court so are their's, if you
see what I mean?

> If you can constrain something as not been able to be used for
> commerical gain, then you can constrain it to not be used for other
> objects, as long as those definitions are clear.

Again, very true. The development of Creative Commons licenses build on the
lesson that you can shape licenses in your own image, such as the GPL was made
by FSF.

But the advantages of being part of a community of Copyleft copyright licenses
are not so easy to discard.

I advocate CC licenses because they seem to me to be a good project to spread
the words and wisdom of Copyleft beyond the world of software, and as such I
also think that the development of CC is good for the GPL and the Free Software
community: the further we can get the mainstream (and artists, novelists and
media makers) to accept these new forms of copyrights, then the  further we
also are to secure their validity (through custom).

AktiviX might just settle for GNU FDL, and that is also a very good choice.

hope this helps..

mp