Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab AT web.de>]

Am Donnerstag, 28. Februar 2013, 11:40:24 schrieb Kat Walsh:
> Any such license that
> would be considered would have to have all of the same requirements as
> BY-SA, but would also contain some additional requirements that BY-SA
> did not.

I think this is the most important point here: For this scheme to work, the 
restrictions on cc by-sa must be a clear subset of other copyleft licenses, 
because those won’t allow adding additional restrictions.

So the drafting of cc by-sa already takes a clear decision which licenses 
might be seen as compatible in future.

This could only be avoided, if the requirement would be dropped, that the 
unmodified source should always be cc by-sa: Otherwise, if the combined work 
were available under another license, people would not be allowed to strip 
away all the new stuff and use the result under the same license, which is a 
restriction on changing the resulting work that might not be compatible with 
the other license (that’s why one-way compatibility is needed in the first 
place, after all: the terms of the other license and by-sa aren’t completely 
compatible).

I think that this won’t often happen in practise, because if the license is 
written inside a given file, then editing the file might be considered 
implicit acceptance of the license, if the copyright header is not 
explicitely changed while editing (and changed would mean to specify on a 
line-by-line or even character-by-character base which license applies to 
which part…).

> 1. Is one-way compatibility with BY-SA worth having a full
> conversation on in the near future? (We would expect this to be a
> discussion that did not have to finish before the 4.0 process
> concluded: the text in the current draft of 4.0 does not prescribe
> either decision.)

For me the missing one-way compatibility is the one major obstacle to using 
cc by-sa. As long as I cannot use cc by-sa works together with GPL works, I 
see no way into the future for cc by-sa. If I were to license something under 
cc by-sa and someone else would contribute, I would no longer be able to use 
it together with works which require the stronger protections of the (A)GPL 
to have a meaningful copyleft.

Since I also program and write in markup which gets processed to opaque 
documents, protection of the freedom of the source is an important 
requirement for some of my works.

Best wishes,
Arne
--
Konstruktive Kritik:

- http://draketo.de/licht/krude-ideen/konstruktive-kritik

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