[cc-community] An easy way to notify licensors about new license versions

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Fri Dec 7 16:20:37 EST 2007


Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> When would permission to distribute verbatim under later license 
> actually help?

There are a few edge cases that would be affected. One of them is new
compatibility-updates to the license to allow conversion to other
free-licenses with similar conditions.

If such an update is added to the license, then works under the new
license can be converted and combined with the new work.

However, works under an older license must first be derived to a new
work to allow the update to the new license, and then the *derivative*
work would have to be combined with the work under the "compatible" license.

This is a specific example that's somewhat likely to come up, but any
change to the sharealike terms would impose a similar "artificial"
constraint.

Another example would be efforts to "fix" problems in attribution or DRM
clauses. The principle use-case would be to reduce the burden on
distribution of the work, but such fixes would only be useful for the
derivatives of the work, not the work itself.

> I'm wary of adding something to the interface that requires lots of 
> explanation and little benefit.

Sensible.

I don't know whether this merits it or not, but it might.

Cheers,
Terry


-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com



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