Development of Creative Commons licenses

[evan AT bad.dynu.ca (Evan Prodromou)]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 02:07:16PM +0100, Branko Collin wrote:

> > > I read the legal text, but I'm still not sure about the following: I
> > > am making a website for a friend and want to use a photo gallery
> > > system distributed under  Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0
> > > License. I make the website for free, but the photographer is going
> > > to use the gallerysystem for his photos, which off course he wants
> > > to sell.
> > > 
> > > Is that allowed?
> > 
> > As far as I can tell, no. I don't speak for Creative Commons, though.
> 
> It doesn't seem to be intention of CC to infect non-derivative works 
> with its licenses, but from what I understand, it is indeed unclear 
> whether he would be allowed to sell the photos.

The licensing of the photographs isn't at issue. It's the commercial
use of the software. The photo gallery is being used for commercial
advantage; whether its use falls under copyright (and section 3 of the
BY-NC-SA license) is one of those crappy is-it-content-or-software
problems.

Unless this is some Insanely Great photo gallery maker, I'd ignore it
and use one that's free for commercial use, too.

> Open Source is a marketing term that refers to a type of development 
> methodology.

Open Source software is software that conforms to the Open Source
definition.

     http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

Some people misuse the term; I know that the two image gallery tools I
linked to are real Open Source.

~Evan