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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: email AT greglondon.com
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: contribution from others, granting special permission
  • Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 12:43:48 -0800 (PST)

I recently discovered the creative commons website.
I've been writing code under teh perl artistic license
and I'm familiar with the GNU licenses, but I recently
wrote a Perl training manual that I wanted to copyleft
and was pointed here.

I think the creative commons license will do what I
want with the right combination of options.
I was thinking I'd dual-license with the GNU-FDL
but after reading the archives here, I think that
will actually create problems.

One thing I noticed on the Creative Commons cartoon
that explains their license, is that it keeps mentioning
examples where people have to get the author's permission
before doing something that isn't in the current license.
(like grant someone permission to sell copies for money
if the normal license is NonCommercial.)

It separately mentions the Share Alike option for
derived works. But my understanding is that the two
are sort of mutually exclusive.

If someone creates a derived work and puts it back
out into the world under the ShareAlike option,
then you can't roll those changes into "your" version
and then give someone else permission to sell
copies for money.

I've heard of stories where this has been a problem
with software, where software is never right the first
time, and so requires bug fixes/changes from other people,
and once you roll those changes in, you are no longer
the sole author, so you no longer have the right to
give special permission to use the work outside the
public license.

I haven't gone through the entire Creative Commons
website yet, but I've not yet seen this mutual
exclusion explained or highlighted.

The point of ShareAlike or CopyLeft, for software at least,
is so that other people can contribute bug fixes and
you can roll them into your code. But once you do this,
you would have to get permission from every contributer
if you wanted to relicense the work for someone.

Is this true? or did I just make this up somewhere?

If it is true, it seems that the Creative Common
website doesn't really point this out to people
interested in using their licenses because I
didn't find it anywhere.




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