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RMS says Creative Commons Unacceptable
Mr A Coward writes "Richard Stallman has stated in an interview that he no longer supports Creative Commons licenses. In the interview carried on LinuxP2P.com, and which is largely about the P2P and DRM issues, Stallman ends by saying: 'I no longer endorse Creative Commons. I cannot endorse Creative Commons as a whole, because some of its licenses are unacceptable.' He suggests instead using the GPL for creative works." The crux of his argument is that, since he disagrees with some of the CC licenses, and people tend to lump them all together, he feels compelled to reject them all. What's your take? Are some Creative Commons licenses worth using, even if others aren't?
RMS: People have a right to share copies of published works; P2P programs are simply a means to do it more usefully, and that is a good thing.
If we are going to mince words maybe we should start with an honest appraisal of the difference between sharing (as in borrowing a book) and copying. All of us who make a living being creative understand the shortcomings of current copyright legislation and know that we need people to think about creative work in new ways if we are going to take IP law into the 21st century; we know tilting in favor of multi-national corporations at the expense of individuals is a mistake, but we are not going to get anywhere with the type of lazy thinking which asserts things like, "If copyright law forbids people from sharing, copyright law is wrong." I'll take Lawrence Lessig's ideas over Mr. Stallman's any day.
If it's true (as RMS says in the interview) that the various Creative Commons licenses are "more different than similar", and if they differ on issues you care about, then yes, I would have to agree with Stallman that they need to be discussed separately, that you can't make a blanket statement saying either "I support CC licenses" or "I reject CC licenses". If some Creative Commons licenses are worth using and others aren't, it would be best to stop talking about them collectively as "Creative Commons licenses" and instead discuss them under their own names.
Call it the GNU\Creative Commons License. Problem solved.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I think it's time we just start ignoring RMS. Once the national media noticed him about 5-6 years ago, his ego has tipped the scales. He's so far off the deep end that I for one don't want to be associated with his ideas.
It's like we're all saying "Open source is a good thing", and he's now picking up that banner, saying "Unless it's completely open and completely free in every possible sense of the word, it's wrong". That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying "Open source is a good thing".
sig?
IMHO, if you're going to have some sort of umbrella for licenses to be put under, it should mean something. Near as I can tell, Creative Commons has no real criteria for deciding whether or not a license is acceptable.
If I read that a license is OSI approved, I know exactly what that means, and what sorts of things I can expect to be able to do and what I can expect to not be able to do.
If I hear that a license is a creative commons license, it tells me nothing. For all I know, it might be "You're allowed to distribute this only if you feel strongly that you have green skin.". They have license that discriminate based on what country you're a citizen of, so I don't see why they won't pick other weird things in the future.
If they want to be taken seriously, they will publish clear criteria for the acceptability of a license.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
In other news, water is still wet, Microsoft is still a monopoly, and people dislike paying taxes.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
I stopped listening to him sometime around the GNU/Linux debacle. He doesn't really provide much value to anyone who doesn't want to be hard left.
Don't get me wrong, the man did some great things in bringing forth the Free Software movement, but now it seems like his goal is to destroy everything that doesn't fit his ideals, and that's just as dangerous as what he opposes.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
He suggests instead using the GPL for creative works.
You mean he's pushing his own ideas as better then someone elses? I'm shocked, SHOCKED!
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Several years ago, I heard Stallman speak at a lecture at my university. He was clearly very smart, and very driven by ideological goals. On top of all that, there was also a hint of that indefinable quality shared by most crazy people. Something about him was not quite right--I got a sense that his grasp on reality was slipping a bit. Maybe this is necessary for a person to make the kind of sacrifices he has, but it's a dangerous balance.
From reading the recent draft of the GPL v3, and the article attached to this story, I get a sense that he's slipped further. For instance, when he spoke at my university, he recognized that the best way to achieve your goals is to have limited, realistic goals, and focus on those. When people asked him about copyright on music or movies, he diplomatically dodged the question and said it was a separate issue from his Free Software philosophy, and he didn't want to address it. In the interview linked in TFA, he outright attacks copyright for these things. The GPL v3's attack on DRM is similar. Stallman has sacrificed the clarity and readibility of the GPL v2 in order to attack patents and DRM.
Now, maybe you agree with Stallman about copyright for music, etc. Even so, you should recognize that that puts you farther outside the mainstream, and it's much harder to change the mainstream when you're 1,000 miles away. If a bunch of Americans write letters to Congress demanding that copyright be abolished*, they will be ignored. If they ask that copyright law take a step back towards the original constitutional idea of limited (in time and power) protection to promote progress in science and the useful arts, that may actually get somewhere. It is vitally important that we sound reasonable.
Stallman has lost his sense of perspective and his grasp on reality. I think it's possible that he is now harmful to the Free Software movement, and the community needs to think about how to deal with this problem. If the community asked him to step down, would he?
* I know Stallman didn't outright call for the abolition of copyright. Still, the changes he wants (the freedom for anyone to distribute any published work) amount to nearly the same thing.
Someone forgot to give Stallman his medication this week. Who's turn is it?
What Stallman is saying sounds, as usual, intellectually consistent. Because some licenses that are called Creative Commons licenses include restrictions that Stallman does not support, Stallman will not endorse the Creative Commons brand. In other words, he will not automatically give you a pat on the back just because you use a Creative Commons license; he wants to know what the terms of the license are first.
Sounds fine to me. I've never been a big supporter of Creative Commons for much the same reason. All Creative Commons seems to be, to me, is a collection of license that someone has paid a lawyer to draft up and then donated that work to the public. You can pick and choose between the licenses and their clauses. It's a generous donation and it's very handy.
Then again, I've never seen how Creative Commons amounts to the "social movement" that people make it out to be. Stallman, whether you agree with him or not, seems devoutly intent on shaking up the foundations of the modern concept of intellectual property. By comparison, Creative Commons licenses seem like little more than tools for helping people navigate the status quo.
Breakfast served all day!
Are some Creative Commons licenses worth using, even if others aren't?
Absolutely! The organization as a whole is trying to better society. I read many of Lawrence Lessig's articles and agree with just about everything he says. His goal is to provide options. A full range of options. Pick the ones that suit your needs and ignore the rest.
After all, isn't that what we do with our Linux systems? We pick the distro and packages we want and ignore the rest. If you don't like OpenOffice it doesn't mean you shouldn't use Linux! Just don't use the parts you don't like!
Developers: We can use your help.
I can't help but wonder if people would take Stallman a bit more seriously if he shaved and got a haircut. His appearance might then sufficiently approach the norm to prevent the immediate impression most people would receive upon seeing him: namely that he's an overaged hippie out of his time, out of his place, and out of his mind.
If I write something, I get to pick the license. If Stallman doesn't like it, I'll sleep just fine at night and will have no problems looking at myself in the mirror.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I read the draft and found a section that would prevent busybox from using GPLv3. (It's the second coming of the BSD advertising clause: each busybox binary would have to contain GPL boilerplate text in the binary itself, and we're trying for small binary size on embedded systems. In GPL2, the advertising clause was optional. In GPL3 it isn't. That's a fatal flaw for us.)
I tried to comment through their web page, but it doesn't work with Konqueror. I sent a comment via their email system, but it was bounced by their robot. (The subject text, "Concerns about gpl3 and busybox", doesn't appear in the GPL draft document, this has not been seen by a human nor will it ever be. Try jumping through the hoop again.)
It was about this time I decided I really don't care enough about placating Stallman. Sticking with v2 is just fine with me, and his opinion about creative commons is irrelevant as well. At this point, I consider Stallman irrelevant, and GPLv3 just another incompatible license fragmenting the open source userbase.
A pity, really...
There are many times when "Screw you guys, I'm going home" is a valid response, but Stallman has done it so many times, about so many Open Source projects that don't adhere to Pope Stallman's ex cathedra Encyclical on The True and Only GPL that it's lost all meaning. Yeah, RMS, we've figured out nothing that you haven't personally blessed is pure and holy enough for you. Next question.
Perhaps his most impressive feat is making Eric Raymond look reasonable by comparison...
Crow T. Trollbot
I like the GPL and use it for software, but it's just not right for things like text. For instance, I can use my GPL-given right to revise and extend Richard Stallman's text to read:
.)
I love the Creative Commons. I think the Creative Commons is great as a whole, because some of its licenses are not unacceptable. In fact, I want Larry Lessig to have my baby. Wait that's not feasible.
(Changes in bold
What's right for software is not right for matters of opinion or fact. The distinction between sources and binaries don't matter here and actually confuse the right decisions. Nor is there any reason to believe that someone would get anything out of the ability to revise and extend anyone else's words. Okay, it might make sense for a collaborative manual, but I think there are many cases where the right leads to the trouble we're seeing with the clever editors of the Wikipedia.
If it were anyone else they could be safely ignored, but RMS brought us the GPL, and it was through his uncomprimising commitment to his vision that we have the movement of Open Source today. Yes people - Open Source, he is one of the fathers of Open Source even if he has disowned his own child. The point is that the man is uncomprimising to the point of being irrational.
But is he - in this instance - being irrational? Well, the creative commons typically used by Flickr, is simply a means of easily defining the rights you are providing. It can mean a number of things, and I think he has a point - that its confusing; you have to read the rights for every bit of work, rather than being able to trust that a creative commons mark means you have certain rights.
I still wouldn't use the GPL for writing or music because the GPL has clauses specifically aimed at software. There is no "source code" for music, and no obligation to distribute the score of the music along with the audio recordings for example. However, the creative commons is a diluted concept if you don't gauranttee certain rights to people, and they have to dig to see what their rights actually are.
Stallmans problem isn't one of intellect as such, but rather poor communication. He communicates in a uncomprimising and arrogant way; his way or the highway; and is unwilling to be part of a bigger team that he has no direct control over. That is why Open Source came about - we escaped the limits of Stallmans retoric.
Stallman still doesn't get Open Source I think - The Hurd being an example more of Cathedral style than Bazzar style development. Open Source has overtaken him for a reason, and that reason is a positive feedback cycle generated by a community of willing participants.
The big difference between open source and free software is the uncomprimising ideological dogma of Stallman. Free Software was about the Stallmans dictatorship; his word was law in that universe. Open Source on the other hand starts with the principles of Free Software, but does not insist the developers have the same ideological passions as Stallman.
That said, Open Source has not diluted the principle (as the Creative Commoms may have) by retaining a clear statement about what is and is not Open Source.
Now maybe in a reality-free zone where everybody works for the common good and nobody takes more than his* fair share, that would be a reasonable thing to pass off as a fact. But Stallman's "facts" are impractial in the real world.
Human beings have produced great art, science, and engineering for millennia in the absence of copyright protection. The assertion that copyrights and patents have any social or economic merit at all is at best unproven.
So, the ideologues trying to push unproven ideas on the rest of us are people like you, people who make strained arguments that somehow society needs to bear the costs and complexities of IP law.
Go prove your case before you whine about Stallman.
RMS's position is harmful to his cause, maybe for the first time in his history of Free Software advocacy.
;-)
/all/ software (or at least all software most people ever want or need) Free (with a capital F), his rigid philosophical stance was needed to counter-act the inevitably creeping process of cooption and re-commercialization by the "Industry". Thus if one accepts that his goals are desireable or at least valid, one can't really say that his rigidity was ever harmful to these goals... at worst it represented an opinion /someone/ needed to hold to maintain progress in the right direction.
/can/ do better.
I haven't even read other comments yet as I'm writing this, but I'm sure that most other commenters would agree with the first part of that sentence, but rather fewer with the second.
Everybody knows that RMS's public posititions on Free Software tend to be uncompromising to say the least... and while I personally have often thought a more compromising position might be more productive especially in the short term, for his stated long-term goal of making
However, in this case I believe he is wrong. I order to achieve RMS's goals of ubiquitous Free software, one has to address the underlying economic assumptions made by society. The problem is that the dominant "neoclassical" view of economics is also very rigid and exclusive... it holds that its idealized "Free Market" is the best and only way to conduct economic congress, and Free Softare does not fit. This economic view is held by essentially all those in power or in control of the economic resources in our global civilization, and successfully sold to the mass of humans that compose this civilization.
What needs to happen before Free Software and many other urgently needed economic alternatives can fully succeed is that the noeclassical market's grip on the global economy needs to losen. For this to happen it is important to first show that viable alternatives exist, and can be to the benefit of our civilzation! That the rigid view of the Free Market is wrong and that we
The Creative Commons has done the remarkable job of helping all alternatives to succeed better without much more of a philosophical position than to say "alternatives are needed and exist". This is to the benefit of the whole spectrum of opinion and a detriment only to the dominant exclusivist one which needs to be toppled.
Yes, it does (very slightly) weaken the Free Software Movement's "GPL Brand", which derives some strength from it's position as the opposit extreme of the dominant one by labeling the all alternatives generically (all are "CC license with X provisions"). But this harm is minimal because the CC and the FSF operate in on different types of information, and aside from occasionally saying "just use the GPL", RMS has not really made any effort to address the clearly at least somewhat different needs of non-software media. In any case, any dilution of the FSF's position would come fairly and as part of a democratizing process.
So, surely RMS must admit that the overall benefit of the CC's well executed efforts massively outweighs any harm it does to his own cause.
: Jürgen Botz
In a way, history is repeating itself.
During the 1850's there were all these groups that wanted to work out a friendly solution so that the slave states could get along with the free states. Rules to be nicer to slaves, shorter slave terms, more clearly defined boundaries, and so on and so on. Well they didn't get it, it was an all or nothing game. The very nature of the beast was coercive and restrictive in a way that could not survive the industrial revolution.
Well today, there are people who want a "compromise" with the copyright system. A shorter term here, a nicer enforcement there, more controll to the original author here, and so on and so on. What these people don't understand that the very nature of beast centers arround coercing how people can use and manipulate information at their disposal - the anti thesis of the information age. The only kind of copyright that can survive the information age, is one that can not be enforced.
Instead of crying about that, or clinging to old ways, what people need to do is learn how to make money from content services and not from content controll.
Has there actually been cases of brands being stolen in this way? Everyone seems to talk about it as though it were inevitable, but it seems plausible that even if copyright laws allowed a rival company to steal it's franchise, actual fans would always prefer the original makers, and view the copy as an entirely separate work. While they can steal ideas, they can't steal people. A rival company may try to do the Simpsons without Groening, but it will flop, over and over.
I posit that such a nightmare scenario is entirely illusionary, especially for franchises that are worth protecting.
RMS needs to get his head out of software. Way back at the beginning of the Free Software movement, he said that his idea should be applied to software only, and not to other copyrightable materials. Now it appears that he has changed his mind and wants people to use a software-specific license on non-software products.
CC licenses are not meant for software.
A novel that is released under a CC NonCommercial or NonDeriv license might not meet the definition of Free Software, but who the fsck cares? It ain't *software*! Ditto for videos, music, websites, etc. Hell, not even his own GFDL documentatoin meets the Free Software definition!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
You're wrong. He did write the original versions of gcc and gdb, and Emacs among many other things. The original Emacs was ground breaking, not trivial as you allege. Whatever else you may think of him, RMS's code contributions are huge.
His biography is pretty good. See also his Wikipedia entry.