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.