Re: Unbundling the GPL

Rob Myers wrote:
> Software is a tool. People shouldn't be fooled by the
existence of 
> written source code or the legal bodge that declares
this a literary 
> work. 

Well, yeah, most of the time.

But there are software applications which are less
"tool-like" or which
are tools, but are so specialized that you don't care if you
can't "use
it to open paint tins". In these niche applications, NC
or ND licenses
might find a market, e.g.:

"play once" games (puzzles) -
	It's hard to justify long term development because the
	value is recouped over a short time by many people (or
	else there are "spoilers" and it's not as
valuable to
	most of the market). In such cases, the effort to develop
	and then get paid through per-copy sales makes sense,
	as does a secretive pre-release and a rapid release.

tax and other legal software
	The tax code changes every year, so long term development
	is not feasible. Furthermore, the government may wish
	to reduce non-compliant returns by controlling which
	software may be used through crypto-keys and the like, so
	you may have to buy a license to release software of this
	type.

There are probably other examples, which I'm not going to
brainstorm
about -- I have no desire to write NC/ND software.

But then, the obvious question is "Why do you need
source?" Neither
of these applications is going to get any boost from
community
development, nor is community knowledge of the source code
beneficial to
the community.

Also, of course, the game might've been divided into
"engine" and
"content" components, allowing it to benefit from
community-based engine
design. This is actually not a bad business strategy: create
a free
platform which has community-developed games, then sell
bigger-budget
proprietary games that run on it. Pretty much everybody wins
in that
scenario: the company makes money and reduces engine
development costs,
the community gets a well-written and tested game engine,
players get a
variety of free games and some high-quality commercial ones
as well (so
if -- as I personally theorize -- community and proprietary
developed
games have different strengths then the players get all of
them).

But, as I've said, CC-NC and CC-ND, used alongside existing
free
software licenses like GPL and BSD/MIT/Expat (whatever)
licenses provide
all the tools you need for those models.

And IMHO, if you aren't a shrewd enough business person to
figure that
out from the existing materials on these licenses, then you
don't have
any business trying these kinds of tricky strategies:

Far more people would suffer from accidentally using By-SA
for software
than would benefit from using NC/ND for it. And if you want
a more
nuanced position than 'CC licenses are bad for software' --
well, you
can ask here.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancockAnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpac
eworks.com

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