Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Sarah Pearson <sarah AT creativecommons.org>]

Hi Ben, thanks for your note! Answers inline.

On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 6:54 PM, Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam AT benfinney.id.au> wrote:

What is the current state of discussion to change the ShareAlike
requirements to guarantee the recipient can actually make derivative
works from the corresponding source?

Although it was raised and discussed during the 4.0 process, CC ultimately decided not to add a source requirement in BY-SA 4.0. There were many reasons articulated as to why not, including the difficulty of defining what source looks like for all the types of content licensed under BY-SA and the added complexity for licensors. The thread linked to above includes a lot of traffic on the lists about this topic and would be worth a read if you're interested. At this point, however, changing BY-SA is not on the table.

We definitely agree that the source requirement in GPLv3 is an important consideration for compatibility between the licenses! We will be prompting a discussion about that topic in a little over a week, but feel free to weigh in now if you have thoughts.

best,
Sarah