Creative Common Copyright Notice in Standalones

[David Bovill]

Just keeping to the parts:

On 8 January 2011 15:51, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:


> Had you chosen a Creative Commons license instead of GPL, you would have
> been able to share your work just as broadly to as many people as before,
> but you would also have had the option of requiring that any additions to
> the code base be contributed to the main project, rather than allowing
> forked derivatives.
>

I'm not sure what you mean here - are you talking about the "No Derivatives"
option <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/>? While this prevents creating
a derived work, it does nothing to stop someone hosting the content on their
site - as in your example? I've not explored the use cases of the
No-Derivative clauses that much - as the only ones I've come across it
artists wanting to keep control of the integrity of the work - but you've
got me intrigued. What is it that you want to prevent - other than someone
hosting the content? I just can;t get my head around the business use case
that relates to the license here.

On forking in general, that does come up a lot, and so far in all the
business cases I've seen. while the possibility of a fork certainly
frightens many people, I have actually never seen a clear cut case of it
damaging a commercial project - that is I've not seen any real world
examples of individual or companies having their work forked and losing out
- it has in all the cases I've looked at turned out that the main developer
keeps the community, except in cases in which the developer moves on to
other work - in which case the code would have died without the possibility
of low friction forking. Indeed the main developer has nearly always
benefited by being commercially valuable to competitors due to their
position in the community and knowledge of the people and code base - so
they end up getting a good deal from what otherwise would have been a
hostile takeover of competitive product.

I would really like to hear examples of companies or individuals having lost
out commercially by having their code forked - maybe there are cases but
people just keep quiet about them? I have experience of many projects not
working out, but these have always been down to a failure of attracting
developers, or related issues often as a result of taking a half-open
approach.

I can see stopping others from benefiting commercially (the non-commercial
option) as preventing the type of revenue loss you mention - for instance
through advertising revenue, but the GPL type clauses force projects to
contribute back to the main project, which in practice is sufficient to
prevent destructive forking for active projects?

Thanks for taking the time to respond - my interest is in real business
models built around licenses, or other legal innovations - and not the
politics :)**