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[Andrae Muys <andrae AT netymon.com>]

On 04/09/2008, at 3:45 PM, elliott bledsoe wrote:

hello all. it would seem that all the exciting new from creative commons at the moment is coming out of google.

not that long ago google code (http://code.google.com) introduce cc licensing, allowing hosted projects to release their code under the attribution and the attribution-share alike licences. find out more here: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/07/introducing-content-licenses-on-google.html

As a professional software developer I thought I might clarify two points.  First, the Creative Commons licences shouldn't be used for software. The FOSS community has spent the past 20 years on issues of derivative works, patent law, and distribution. If you want to release open software, you would be extremely foolish to ignore this work. I would strongly recommend you use whichever of the MIT/BSD, Apache2.0, or (L)GPL licences best suit your purposes. Second, google isn't "allowing hosted projects to release their code under [CC-licences]," for the reasons I allude to above, they still insist on mainstream open-source licences. If you read the press release you will see that what google has done is permit the separate licensing of 'content' (music, images, icons, stories, characters, etc) within their hosted projects under CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licences, roughly corresponding to MIT/BSD/Apache2.0 and (L)GPL respectively.

Andrae Muys

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Andrae Muys - andrae AT netymon.com

RDF/Semantic-Web Consultant

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