RMS on Creative Commons
Seems a lot of folks are upset about RMS criticizing Creative Commons in a recent LinuxP2P interview. I think he is being quite sensible about implicit endorsements, given his position as Free Software spokesman, and the confusion that surrounds the different Creative Commons licensing options.
As your question illustrates, people have a tendency to disregard the differences between the various Creative Commons licenses, lumping them together as a single thing. That is as mixed-up as supposing San Francisco and Death Valley have similar weather because they’re both in California.
Some Creative Commons licenses are free licenses; most permit at least noncommercial verbatim copying. But some, such as the Sampling Licenses and Developing Countries Licenses, don’t even permit that, which makes them unacceptable to use for any kind of work. All these licenses have in common is a label, but people regularly mistake that common label for something substantial.
I no longer endorse Creative Commons. I cannot endorse Creative Commons as a whole, because some of its licenses are unacceptable. It would be self-delusion to try to endorse just some of the Creative Commons licenses, because people lump them together; they will misconstrue any endorsement of some as a blanket endorsement of all. I therefore find myself constrained to reject Creative Commons entirely.
Even among the standard licenses, here’s a world of difference between the (loosely) GPL-like Attribution-ShareAlike, the BSD-like Attribution and the radically non-free Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.
Why do they all get the same “(CC) Some Rights Reserved” placard?
The Creative Commons people are good folk (hi Jon!), and they have accomplished something important: providing a set of standard licenses which are available for anyone to use, so that “All Rights Reserved” can now be a conscious choice rather than simply the least painful default. But it’s a grave mistake to confuse them with the Free Software movement; they have significantly more modest goals.
(Thought experiment: how much Creative Commons content could ship as part of Debian? How about FreeBSD?)
The least Creative Commons could do is to start incorporating their standard “terms buttons” (seen on the “deed” pages) in the Creative Commons placards, or at least encouraging their use alongside the placard in their examples and generated HTML. It would do a lot to dispel confusion.