[JoPP-Public] Fw: Your journal application to DOAJ: Journal of Peer Production

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

Hi Natacha,

On Sat, Sep 09, 2017 at 10:40:09AM +0200, natacha wrote:
> Indeed as said in intro I do not consider myself having any right to a
> voice in this community that exists without me, I only made an
> intervention by sheer attachment to the JoPP.
> 
> Having proposed a text for the next edition I must say the idea of it
> being in CC0 comes as a bad surprise, I will not refrain myself from a
> quick comment:

So this is now two interventions :-)
(just kidding, couldn't help it!)

> I have always wondered about this term "restrictive license" as there is
> no neutrality in our world, the issue is: to whom is it restrictive for,
> it seems it only restricts capitalist appropriation, as it certainly
> does not restrict commercial or community use, quite the contrary, it

Of course you're right here. I've used "restrictive" in the specific
sense in which it used in the Free Software and Free Culture world.  If
you look those positions up, you'll find that no "usage" restriction on
the material is actually well-defined in those contexts.

> I would have difficulties to publish in a place where third parties
> could change my word without removing my name.

This is a common flaw that I see in many arguments (in fact, often the
same arguments) brought against "non restrictive" (in the same sense as
above) licenses. The fact that *the license* doesn't say you cannot do
that, does not main it legal to do. In fact, misattributing content to
someone is prone to libel and/or plagiarism risks. Depending on the
context, that might violate either the law or the ethical practices of a
specific community (the scientific one in our case). So CC0 doesn't
necessarily mean "free for all" as it might seem at first sight. But
anyone, I'm more of a copyleft kind of person, so it really shouldn't be
up to me to defend CC0 in this context :-), but yes CC-BY-SA does allow
commercial use by third parties and I'm totally fine with that. I'm a
scientist and as such I want the results of my work to be shared as much
as possible, and I'm already paid for my work, so I couldn't care less
when: a) my work is shared, and b) others make money out of it. Getting
some of those money into my pocket will not improve at all my ability to
produce additional similar content in the future.

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli . zack at upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o
Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director  . . . o o o . . . o .
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