Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito has a great post on his blog today about license proliferation. Drawing from his experience as a board member at both ICANN and the Open Source Initiative, Ito outlines the problems created by license proliferation:

As sharing and the adoption of new, free licenses begins to accelerate, I believe we are in danger of creating sloppy licenses or incompatible licenses backed by torrents of content funded by well-meaning governments, non-profits, users and even commercial entities. Poorly drafted licenses, licenses that are not adequately stewarded or supported by a dedicated team of legal experts, content encumbered by onerous neighboring rights and isolated and restrictive licenses can create mountains of unusable content which we might call “free” but which for all practical purposes become puddles of unusable content and what we would call “failed sharing”.

As Ito points out, Creative Commons has the benefit of learning from previous license movements in making sure our licenses not only fill a specific need but also have low transaction costs and high interoperability. As request for additional features arise, we remain focused on feedback from our community to make sure we provide as many functional options as possible while keeping things simple. Read the full post for more.