[Aust-NZ] Superficial review of copyright issues related to collection and publication of education material on OSGeo Website (LINK)

[Robert Coup]

Hi Simon,

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 2:47 PM, Simon Cropper
<scropper at botanicusaustralia.com.au> wrote:
> If anyone is interested I have posted a lengthy post on the OSGeo-Edu list.
>
> http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/edu_discuss/2010-August/001179.html

I'm not going to subscribe to yet another list, I do have one comment
though (feel free to repost):

> (a) that the CC-BY-SA is quite a common licence. In my mind it reaffirms my
> belief that one of the main means of gratification for contributors of the open
> source community is recognition of their input.

Unless you explicitly waive attribution, every CC license except CC0
includes it.

> That why it puzzles me why
> people are happy with allowing their works to be modified (that is, derivatives
> created) without ensuring the quality of the derived work is maintained.

Why do you think people will always make it worse? I'd suggest that
anybody picking it up will intend to make it better, and given they're
going to the effort, probably will.

By using a No-Derivatives license it prevents an author from taking
your tutorial with Australian datums/data/references and swapping it
for Ugandan information, but otherwise leaving the workflows the same.
Or using a different FOSS package to perform the same tasks. Or
combining several Australian tutorials into a larger work. Or even
fixing a bug in your original tutorial.

Yes, they could ask you, and you'd probably say yes - but it just puts
hurdles in the way, which means less people will even attempt to jump
over them. If someone did ask, would you spend time to review their
work? Would you say they could do it, but only if they let you approve
it before release? If you will automatically say yes, why bother
putting NoDerivs on?

In the end though, you're the author and it's your work to license
however you want. Thanks for writing! :)

Rob :)