Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

Daniel Carrera said:
> Greg London wrote:
>
>> What I don't understand is why you go from the CC-BY license
>> which is nearly Public Domain and jump to a copyleft license (GPL),
>> which is much more restrictive than CC-BY and the various
>> Public Domain licenses.
>>
>> CC-BY is much closer to something like BSD than something like GPL.
>
> Greg, I am not leaving the CC-BY. I love the CC-BY, I think it's great.
> The GPL is included as an alternative. It's *dual* licensing. And there
> are some benefits to using the GPL instead of FDL. For one, it allows
> mixing with the GPL. So, for example, we could consider using that work.

If you put someone else's GPL stuff in your document,
you can only use the GPL license for the end result,
CC-BY very nearly puts the work in teh public domain,
which is something the GPL will not allow.

Unless your dual licensing only applies CC-BY to
the particular sections of the document that are
not explicitely GPL, and that would only work if
you can justify the single file as an "aggregation"
of GPL-only works aggregated wih dual licensed
GPL/CC-BY works. If it qualifies as a single derived
work, then if any source is exclusively GPL,
then the result must be GPL.

My surprise wasn't thinking you were leaving CC-BY,
my surprise was that you were mixing the strongest copyleft
license in existence with a 'weak' license that is
very well near Public Domain.