Licensing

[Jeff Schering]

On 8/8/06, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> I agree that there is nothing wrong with third party publishers using
> the material commercially, however I think we should impose a
> share-alike condition, that derivative works remain under the same (or
> other?) free license.
>
> I think the CC-BY-SA works fine. Using an existing license also means
> that we get the benefit of much hard work gone into testing the license.
> A single license would also mean that we can use other compatible
> material (hopefully the wiki licensing will be sorted out and it is
> possible it will use something similar, and the forum uses this license
> too).
>

I think we have two options if we use the Creative Commons Public
License (CCPL). They are: Attribution (cc-by), and
Attribution-ShareAlike (cc-by-sa).

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/legalcode
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode

The cc-by license only requires that people who use the original work
must make sure that the original authors are credited in the manner
specified by the original authors.

The cc-by-sa license is identical, except for an additional paragraph
which includes the following sentence: "You may not distribute,
publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the
Derivative Work with any technological measures that control access or
use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this
License Agreement."

That sentence seems mostly aimed at making sure that derivative works
are not made proprietary. For example, a bit of music can't be copied
then released in an encrypted format or with DRM etc. The cc-by
license allows that to happen.

In essence, the cc-by license is Public Domain + Attribution. It
allows your work to be used in any way, including as a "closed,"
proprietary work, provided you get credited as the author.

Neither the cc-by nor the cc-by-sa license require people who use the
original work in a collective work to place that collective work under
the CCPL or equivalent free license. They only require that the
original work carry the original cc-by-sa license and proper author
attribution.

Also, both cc-by and cc-by-sa explicitly allow linking to the license
as an alternative to including it in a document.

I think the cc-by-sa license is the one we should go with. It's the
one used by the forums. It doesn't allow our work to become closed.
Also, it's easier to understand and implement than the FDL.

Cheers,
Jeff

-- 
Jeff Schering
GPG: F23C67E8