Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org>]

(I am not CC, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.)

adam hyde wrote:

> It would seem the GPL would not be 'compatible' under these terms as the
> GPL does not explicitly permit: "the relicensing of derivatives of works
> made available under that license under a particular Creative Commons
> license"

That is correct.

> The gpl does not do this. However, how does the CC-GPL fit into this
> picture? :
> http://creativecommons.org/license/cc-gpl
>
> Its the GPL with a CC wrapper...is the CC-GPL considered to be living
> within the CC family of licenses? If so, then the CC-GPL is 'compatible'
> and the question is answered.

Ignore CC-GPL for the purpose of this discussion, that is just CC trying 
to explain the GPL to people. It's a very good idea (CC-FDL anybody?) 
but can be confusing.

> is there anyone that can clarify this? 
>
> Just to retour...My specific question is:
>
> Can content under the CC-BY-SA (3.0) be distributed under the GPL? ie.
> Is the GPL or 'CC-GPL' a 'similar' or 'compatible' license as per the
> license statement :
> "you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a
> compatible license."
>
> anyone want to make me a happy camper with a categorical yes or no? ;)

Categorically: no.

The GPL is not compatible with BY-SA, and is unlikely to be declared 
compatible.

See above. ;-)

If you are the original licensor you could dual-license under BY-SA and 
GPL, but that's a very bad idea.

> The reason _why_ this is an interesting question for me is that
> documentation about free software is often written in CC BY-SA. If this
> material can be then distributed under the GPL then the docs could be
> distributed with source code without causing developers extra license
> headaches.

You can distribute BY-SA material with GPL material. The FDL was 
designed to be applied to documentation distributed with GPL-ed 
software, and the principle is the same. This is aggregation, and is 
fine under the GPL.

So a GPL-licensed piece of software with BY-SA documentation should be 
absolutely fine. Unless it breaks the rules of a particular distro (e.g. 
Debian).

- Rob.