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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: "Greg London"<email AT greglondon.com>
  • To: "Development of Creative Commons licenses"<cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Most important feature: GPL-compatibility
  • Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 10:44:15 -0500

I think the best thing mentioned thus far is that CC-SA and GNU-GPL are about as compatible with each other as CC-SA and CC-SA-NC.


Alice makes a work and licenses it CC-SA.
Bob makes a work and licenses it CC-SA-NC.

Charlie wants to take those two works and combine them and release them under one license. If Charlie uses CC-SA,  then Bob will be upset because his NC clause has been removed.  If Charlie uses CC-SA-NC, then Alice will be upset because a NC restriction was added to a derivative of her work.

SA and GPL are the same way. They are incompatible. Combining works with both licenses and releasing that combination under a single license will upset someone. If you do not see this, reread the example of Alice and Bob above.

The only way this could possibly work would be if the works are combined not as a derivative but as a collection.  The question is whether CC-SA could work that way. GNU-GPL can work with collections. Not sure about CC-SA because it was never an issue before as far as I know.

Greg




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-----Original message-----
From: Anthony <osm AT inbox.org>
To:
Development of Creative Commons licenses <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent:
Thu, Jan 5, 2012 04:44:00 GMT+00:00
Subject:
Re: [cc-licenses] Most important feature: GPL-compatibility

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 5:00 PM, Francesco Poli
wrote:
> Anyway, I don't see why you seem to think that a clause allowing a
> CC-by-sa → GPL conversion would be harmful.

It would allow people to create derivatives of my CC-BY-SA works which
are licensed only under GPL.

In cases where the requirements of the GPL are a burden, this means I
might not be able to reasonably use derivatives of my CC-BY-SA work.

> Do you see the source-availability requirement as a non-free
> restriction?

In the cases where I choose to release my work under CC-BY-SA, and not
GPL, I see it as a burdensome restriction. If I thought it was a good
restriction, I'd release my work under GPL.

Whether it's a "non-free" restriction is not something I care to worry about.

>> Authors do not have a duty to help others make
>> modifications.
>
> I think the spirit of Free Software is that authors should make life
> for modifiers as easy as possible.

And that's exactly what I mean when I say that the intent of the FSF
is different from the intent of CC.

I shouldn't have to swear an oath to the principles of Free Software
in order to use CC-BY-SA.

>> If we want a less common case, what's the source for a sculpture?
>> What about that die-cast toy that I was talking about earlier?
>
> We are not talking about material objects.

No, we're not. We're talking about the copyrighted work which is
embedded in the material object.

> We are talking about information that may be processed by computers.

CC-BY-SA applies to more than just information that may be processed
by computers.
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