Cc-au mailing list

[Jessica Coates <j2.coates AT qut.edu.au>]

Hi

 

Thanks for the clarification Andrae.

 

And yes - to reinforce the message, Creative Commons definitely doesn't recommend you use our licences for code. Our licences are intended for content - music, film, text etc - not for software.

 

But we do encourage software companies to (like Google) recognise that content connected with code (the manuals, visual elements, sounds in a computer game) does need to be licensed. What's the point in telling people they can distribute and reuse your game if they can't reuse anything within it?

 

Jessica Coates

Project Manager

Creative Commons Clinic

Queensland University of Technology

 

ph: 07 3138 8301

fax: 07 3138 9395

email: j2.coates AT qut.edu.au

 

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From: cc-au-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:cc-au-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Andrae Muys
Sent: Friday, 5 September 2008 11:02 AM
To: cc-au AT lists.ibiblio.org
Cc: cc-nz AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [cc-au] It's all about google!

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

Netymon Pty Ltd