Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Daniel Carrera <dcarrera AT math.umd.edu>]

Ben Francis wrote:

> I'm very keen to license works under a CC license in the future, but am 
> reluctant to do so until the license gets the seal of approval from the 
> people at Debian because I trust them with such matters. Releasing works 
> under a license considered "broken" is (to me) polluting free culture. 
> I'd like my creative works to have as many freedoms as the Free Software 
> I use and to be distributable along with the software, with these 
> freedoms intact.

I felt much like that, as did other people in my team. So last week I went to 
Debian-legal and started looking for options. After a few days of intense 
discussion, we sort of settled on a dual license: GPL/BY

In particular, this is the copyright notice I'll be using:

  This document is Copyright 2004 by its contributors as defined in the 
  section titled Authors. You can distribute it and/or modify it under the 
  terms of either the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later 
  (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html), or the Creative Commons Attribution 
  License, version 2.0 or later (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).

Notice:

1) The presence of the GPL makes it DFSG-free.
2) The "or later" allows me to switch to BY-2.1 when it comes out.
3) The BY allows me to circunvent the #1 reason why you might not want to use 
the GPL for written text: providing sources.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhyNotGPLForManuals

My plan is that non-editable copies (like paper versions or PDFs) will be BY 
license only. This is allowed if the original sources are GPL/BY. People who 
want the sources can always go to my website and grab them under the GPL/BY. 

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel Carrera          | I don't want it perfect,
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