Creative Commons and all that
14 March 2021/cpj
I read a flight log a while back, by sloum, in which he was discussing a
perspective that Creative Commons licences, CC-BY-NC-SA (attribution,
non-commercial, and share alike) wasn't as free as CC-BY-SA.
=>
gopher://circumlunar.space/0/~sloum/phlog/20210218-10.txt
I've been thinking a lot about this. (And reading far more RMS than I would
like.)
Full disclosure, I used to be a software developer. (In the sense that I
made my living crafting and selling custom software -- mostly database
management and remote monitoring systems.) And while I am a proponent of
Free (Libre) software, and nowadays release all of my source code, somewhat
reflexively, I admit to some consternation at the thought of someone taking
my code, which I have released for the good of all, and commercializing it.
Now, logically, in a de minimis situation, does it really matter if someone
takes a portion (or all) of my code, or my writings, and publishes for
profit? In theory, according to the CC-SA (share alike) doctrine, I could
turn around, take their entire corpus, market, and sell it myself provided I
too abided by CC-SA. But where does *that* end? Are we talking revenge-code,
at this point?
Is my capacity to not self-injure protected by CC-SA, in that CC-NC is
redundant? In my day job, I have only an undisputed right to attribution,
which is fine, because my day job includes compensation for my creative
contributions. In the CC world, particularly on the smol internet, do I
suffer reputational damage when my code or my thoughts are absconded with,
even if, or provided that, they are wrapped in a CC-SA buffer? Is this truly
damnum absque injuria?
In other news...
I've set up cron to auto-post gemini flight logs, and where the log is
uniquely date-coded, copy to gopher. If the log ID is alpha-numeric (date +
qualifier), it stays in gemini.
On verra bien.
