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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Compatibility open issue #3: one-way compatibility

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com>
  • To: Development of Creative Commons licenses <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Compatibility open issue #3: one-way compatibility
  • Date: Fri, 02 May 2014 14:47:09 -0700

On 04/28/2014 03:20 PM, Kat Walsh wrote:
> One-way compatibility means that you may take content created under
> the first license and release your contributions to adaptations under
> the second license, but you may not take content released under the
> second license and release the material you contribute to adaptations
> under the first license. With two-way compatibility, you may go in
> either direction. Neither case allows you to simply relicense
> unaltered material under the other license: you may only release your
> contributions to adaptations under the compatible license.
>
> One-way compatibility may be desirable in cases where two-way
> compatibility is not possible--often, because the candidate license
> was developed to address a particular purpose or situation that the
> other license was not. For example, software licenses often contain
> terms that general-purpose content licenses like the CC licenses do
> not. These provisions could prove to be insurmountable obstacles to
> two-way compatibility, but they do not necessarily foreclose the
> possibility of one-way compatibility. Is this a possibility CC should
> consider, or should reciprocity be a prerequisite?

Reciprocity should not be a prerequisite. FDL->BY-SA one-way has
demonstrated that one-way compatibility between similar in spirit but
rather different (due to different initial use cases) licenses is
valuable and acceptable. That one-way was unfortunately time-limited,
but somewhat tolerable as FDL would be relatively unimportant after the
Wikipedia migration. By contrast, neither BY-SA nor GPL will be
unimportant anytime soon.

Mike





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