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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Luke Stodola <lbs6380 AT rit.edu>
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: License compatibility
  • Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 01:01:23 -0500

I've seen a few posts about compatibility with the GFDL. I for one
would really like to see this worked out. It would be great to be able
to "share-alike" between different licenses. You don't know how hard it
is for me to explain to a friend why you can't combine one piece of
music libre with another. In the context of free/libre/open-source,
this license incompatibility seems very counterintuitive.

The GFDL is probably the main other license, but there are others as
well. The EFF Open Audio License comes to mind. I had heard the EFF
was considering making CC-BY-SA the next "version" of the OAL, as they
are already recommending people use it instead of the older OAL. The
Open Content License is another important one. The Design Science
License and the LinuxTag Green Open Music License are similar to
CC-BY-SA but lesser-used. The CC-SA license could possibly include a
clause that allows deriv. works to require attribution (to be compatible
with CC-BY-SA).

One option might be for the share-alike license to have a list of other
licenses which are derivative works can be released under. But this
would have to be updated over time, and as another poster pointed out,
this could be a problem if CC sways from its initial goals. The FSF has
been around for 20 years, and RMS has very strong, well known, views. I
doubt there is much risk with a later version of the GPL differing
radically. Some "joint council" between the FSF and CC could maintain
a list of share-alike licenses which are defined to be compatible with
each other.

Luke Stodola
dxdt.org/audio/

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