Decision: CC-BY / GPL

Branko Collin collin at xs4all.nl
Fri Mar 11 06:43:38 EST 2005


On 10 Mar 2005, at 18:51, Daniel Carrera wrote:

> This is the boilerplate I have in mind:
> 
>     This document is Copyright 2004 its contributors as defined in the
>     section titled AUTHORS. This document is released under the terms
>     of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later
>     (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html), or under the terms of the
>     Creative Commons Attribution License, version 2.0 or later
>     (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), at the option of
>     any part receiving it.

> I would love to hear comments. In particular, about the boiler plate
> above, and whether I did it right. The Debian-legal team helped me
> make it, so I expect it should be fine.

"part" --> "party"?

Seems fine to me, but IANAL.

There was some discussion about dual licensing in the past (look at 
the archives).

In "Dual-licensing under the GNU Free Documentation License and 
Creative Commons *-ShareAlike-*", Evan Prodromou wrote: "The problem: 
I believe that it's not possible to dual-license a derivative work of 
a work dually licensed under by-sa 1.0 and the GFDL. Here's my 
reasoning:"

"My (admittedly inexpert) understanding is that a dual-licensed 
derivative work would not meet the requirements of by-sa 1.0, since 
it is not licensed "only" under the terms of that license. Similarly, 
a dual-licensed derivative work would not meet the requirements of 
the GFDL, since it is not licensed under "precisely" that license."

Although strictly speaking you are not dual-licensing it, it seems 
like you are forcing any down-stream authors to choose between CC-BY 
or GFDL ("under the terms of ... or under the terms of"). Does the 
receiving party has a choice to retain both? (I am not a native 
speaker of English, and subtleties about when to use "or" and/or when 
to use "and" often elude me.)

-- 
branko collin
collin at xs4all.nl



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