The FOSS community was doing fine with BSD and GNU v1 & v2, maybe the odd MIT licenses for decades. Or, decade. Or both. Or neither, if thats your bent. They were substantially similar: here’s the code, this is the license. You may modify the code hut not the license, and any derivative code must contain the original license. Oh and it has to include the code. Some allowed for commercial use, some did not. Not everybody liked that.
Then one day someone, I think it was Apache, decided no these terms don’t work for us, we don’t like to release the code and we want commercial use and to sell support. So they cut a new license. Not everybody cared, and Apache was happy.
Likewise, GNU foundation decided they wanted to compete in commercial space and allow for commercially supported releases, allowing .COMs to make money using and supporting what used to be FOSS. GNUv3 license got issued. Most of everybody who cared didn’t like that, but at least IBM, Oracle and Amazon are happy.
And then suddenly everyone was cutting their own licenses, and people who cared kinda gave up on it and went with what works.
Eventually, the people behind Wikipedia and the mediawiki software decided the People needed a license, so the Creative Commons license was born. I’m not well read in it, but I gather it us favorable for content producers, and is aaserted in “arenas of public discourse” (my own term) where content derives from individual contributors mostly as prophylaxis against trawlers, scrapers, aggregators and (to be tested,) LLMs.
Of course, asserting the license and defending against contrary use of the content is incumbent on the licensor, and must be defended in civil court. Not everybody can afford a lawyer, and EFF and the Open Source Initiative aren’t rich enough to litigate everything pro bono.
Any or all of the preceding might or might not be bullshit, but its my good faith read of the license shenanigans the last 10 years as I’ve bothered to pay attention to them.
Why? Did I miss the joke?
Its not a very funny joke, sadly.
The FOSS community was doing fine with BSD and GNU v1 & v2, maybe the odd MIT licenses for decades. Or, decade. Or both. Or neither, if thats your bent. They were substantially similar: here’s the code, this is the license. You may modify the code hut not the license, and any derivative code must contain the original license. Oh and it has to include the code. Some allowed for commercial use, some did not. Not everybody liked that.
Then one day someone, I think it was Apache, decided no these terms don’t work for us, we don’t like to release the code and we want commercial use and to sell support. So they cut a new license. Not everybody cared, and Apache was happy.
Likewise, GNU foundation decided they wanted to compete in commercial space and allow for commercially supported releases, allowing .COMs to make money using and supporting what used to be FOSS. GNUv3 license got issued. Most of everybody who cared didn’t like that, but at least IBM, Oracle and Amazon are happy.
And then suddenly everyone was cutting their own licenses, and people who cared kinda gave up on it and went with what works.
Eventually, the people behind Wikipedia and the mediawiki software decided the People needed a license, so the Creative Commons license was born. I’m not well read in it, but I gather it us favorable for content producers, and is aaserted in “arenas of public discourse” (my own term) where content derives from individual contributors mostly as prophylaxis against trawlers, scrapers, aggregators and (to be tested,) LLMs.
Of course, asserting the license and defending against contrary use of the content is incumbent on the licensor, and must be defended in civil court. Not everybody can afford a lawyer, and EFF and the Open Source Initiative aren’t rich enough to litigate everything pro bono.
Any or all of the preceding might or might not be bullshit, but its my good faith read of the license shenanigans the last 10 years as I’ve bothered to pay attention to them.
EFL-2.0 just to be a dork about it.