Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

cc-licenses - Re: 5a (Right to contribute)

cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: 5a (Right to contribute)
  • Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 22:51:09 +0000

On 16 Feb 2004, at 22:10, Mike Linksvayer wrote:

I'm glad that you posted that clause from the OGL -- I was going to look at it, RSN.

IMHO the OGL is something of a masterpiece of Open licensing. It has the right balance between robustness and readability, is designed to allow composition and derivation of works, and was the result of some very clear and passionate thinking about protecting both freedom and sales in a particular industry.

The OGL and the revised BSD license are my favourite licenses.

I note that the IBM's CPL http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cpl.php has a very similar clause, 2d:

"Each Contributor represents that to its knowledge it has sufficient copyright rights in its Contribution, if any, to grant the copyright license set forth in this Agreement."

Yes, that sounds about equivalent.

It does sound a lot less scary than the explicit warranty in CC 1.0 licenses. Is it materially different?

IANAL but yes because you are only making claims about your *own* work rather than work that you have received.

Is "representing" less strong or otherwise distinct from "warranting"?

IANAL, so I couldn't say. But you'll notice that even if the clause was phrased very strongly, you are still only claiming that you have produced your own work, which is implicit in the fact that you are publishing it under your own name. The important thing is to compartmentalise risk rather than take it on from contributors and pass it on to consumers where at all possible. This is very important, as the SCO debacle and NASA's license requirements show.

- Rob.





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page