Louis

My takeaway from reading the public labs site was the following: CC Share-alike has one potential weakness: people who build off of someone's original plans can see their work become closed, since the originator of the project can change his or her mind about licensing. Thus, it forces people downstream to make their development open while also allowing the potential for someone upstream to patent and close the project, taking downstream developers contributions along with it. CERN does not allow an upstream developer to do so. My final position is that CERN is the way to go. Part of me did feel like the ability to close a project was a useful tool to use against corporations who may want to use my work, but further thought made me realize that that benefit would probably not pan out in practice. If a corporation really wanted to keep using my work, they no doubt will find a way; waging patent war is not the battle I intend on fighting. Meanwhile, the cost of this ability is that downstream users are at-risk of my whims and this discourages their own development of a tool that I originated. In short, the benefit of being able to fight a battle that I don't want to fight isn't worth the cost of discouraging collaboration.

I can easily think of a dozen potential problems with so few rules, however, I fully agree the idea we shouldn't fix it until it's broken. I think that I'm just used to building things and trying to anticipate everything that can go wrong; I don't think the method works when building community.