Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <greglondon.1 AT gmail.com>]

On 4/26/07, Björn Terelius <bjorn.terelius AT gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, I would like a more nuanced position on using CC for software.

 

 

NC/ND is safe for software, but ... the

program won't qualify as Free Software

 

That's accurate.

 

I would prefer having specailly adopted versions

of CC BY and SA for software, but there seem to

be a strong opposition against that.

 

Attribution is viewed by free software differently

than CC. FLOS software is generally happy to

have you keep copyright notices and similar

in place wherever they occur. CC's attribution

requires you to attribute in a way appropriate to

the medium, which means the names of all contributers

may have to "bubble up".

 

ShareAlike doesn't work because it doesn't have

a source code requirement (deadly). I also

believe that there are some GPL restrictions

that are specific to patents and tivoisation and

other things that are viewed as software traps,

but are not in the ShareAlike license. This is

often less obvious but can be sneakily deadly.

 

For ShareAlike being used for non-software projects,

there really is no need to worry about software patents.

 

CC could add those options, but it would probably

have to be a bolt on, since not all existing projects

would have source files. And a bolton would mean

yet another incompatible license.

 

There's also the issue of license compatibility with

other software projects. Unless the licenses are

practically identical, one might find it legally difficult

to mix CC-SA-SRC code with GNU-GPL code.

CC-SA-SRC-BY would probably not be compatible

with GNU-GPL. Or maybe it would.

 

But then if they are identical enough to be compatible,

then the question becomes, "why not just use GPL?"

 

There are a number of FLOS licenses that are

closer to public domain than GPL, and those licenses

are generally compatible with GPL.  But anything

more restrictive than GPL (BY maybe, or NC) is NOT

compatible with GPL.

 

So, for your license to play nicely with GPL,

you have to be at least as Free as GPL, or Free-er.

 

Now, if you're intent is to use something far more restrictive

than GNU-GPL, such as NC or ND, then compatibility

with GPL is probably NOT a concern. If you're using

NC or ND, then you're probably not woried about source

code because no one is going to be doing a lot of deriving

of your original code. If you're using NC-ND, then you

probably don't have to worry about software patents or

tivoization, because the person would probably either

end up having to derive the work to implement a patent

(which violates ND) or would be selling some hardware

which could tivoize the software (which violates NC).

 

So, if you're using NC-ND-BY on your software, then

you can probably use the licenses as-is.

 

The things that are missing from the CC licneses

are for protecting Free software projects to remain Free.

And since NC-ND-BY isn't Free and since your use

model isn't concerned about maintaining a Free community,

then you should be able to use NC-ND-BY without concern.

 

I hope that is a sufficiently nuanced explanation for you.

 

Greg

Bounty Hunters: Metaphors for Fair IP laws

http://www.greglondon.com