Just keeping to the parts: On 8 January 2011 15:51, Richard Gaskin <ambassa...@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 :)** _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
