[Live-demo] Liberal licensing of Project Overviews in LiveDVD, do we want this?

[Cameron Shorter]

On 13/07/11 14:09, Simon Cropper wrote:
> On 13/07/11 11:31, Cameron Shorter wrote:
>> On 13/07/11 03:22, Simon Cropper wrote:
>>> On 12/07/11 19:05, Cameron Shorter wrote:
>>>> Simon,
>>>> I'm ok with a variant on your points 1, 3, and 4.
>>>> Point 2 is likely to stump 90% of developers to the point of
>>>> procrastination, unless we can provide a link to a table noting what
>>>> licenses can be included in CC-By and CC-By-SA.
>>>>
>>>> Do you know of such a table?
>>>
>>> Check out Table 2 in the referenced PDF.
>>> http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/~trc/public/publications/jise06/
>>>
>>> It is a bit old but could be a basis for expanding on.
>>>
>>> CC to CC Comparison are shown here...
>>> http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#If_I_use_a_Creative_Commons-licensed_work_to_create_a_new_work_.28ie_a_derivative_work_or_adaptation.29.2C_which_Creative_Commons_license_can_I_use_for_my_new_work.3F 
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Simon, I'm not clear how to interpret your first PDF reference above. If
>> I understand correctly, all the Open Source Software licenses, and
>> public domain documents, can be incorporated into a CC-By and CC-By-SA
>> licensed documents. GPL, LGPL, MPL can be included into CC-By-SA 
>> documents.
>>
>> Is that your interpretation?
>>
>> If that interpretation is correct, then I expect that the majority of
>> our Project Overview source documentation, if not all of it, would be
>> fine to be included into Project Overviews.
>>
>
> Cameron,
>
> Unfortunately this table is a bit deceptive. Initially I took it as a 
> compatibility matrix but this is not the case. The authors are merely 
> stating the various attributes of CC licenses are good indicators of 
> openness and have ranked the FOSS licenses accordingly. All we can say 
> from this table is that most FOSS licenses require attribution, not 
> that they are compatible with CC-BY license (that would be too easy). 
> Sorry but this PDF was probably a red hearing.
>
> I have conducted extensive searches for alternative resources but have 
> found nothing that would help. Essentially projects need to review the 
> license requirement of their content and see if it is compatible.
>
> The problem is that a lot of projects have either not specified 
> anything for their documentation (so it falls back to 'all right 
> reserved') or their documentation appears to be, in-part, caught up in 
> the software license (e.g. GPL or MIT; although this appears only to 
> apply when the content is distributed with the software).
>
> I have posted a thread on the Creative Commons mail list to see if 
> anyone is aware of such a compatibility matrix for open content 
> licenses. I will post back if I get some extra detail.
>
> In the interim if people are able to specify the license that the 
> original work was released, we can make an educated guess based on the 
> deed whether there would be an issue. I am unable to do this for you 
> or for myself because most people have neglected to specify where they 
> obtained the material. The preliminary review of the websites and 
> primary documentation sources that were originally suggested as being 
> the primary source material for project overviews, identified more 
> problems than helped.
>
> I presume that in this sector there would only be a small number of 
> open content licences to compare, so we should reach a watershed 
> pretty quickly and once a project identifies the license of the source 
> material you would be able to check against our draft compatibility 
> matrix.
>
> So in short...
> 1. get projects to identify document sources and the license, if any, 
> that they were released under; and
> 2. We/I can look at the deeds to the licenses to see if derivatives 
> can be created from this work AND they can be re-licensed as CC-BY.
> 3. We/I can create a matrix similar to that used in the  CC to CC 
> Comparison table referenced above.
>

Simon, thanks for all this research you are doing. I'd like to wait to 
see where we get to with this research before going back to the communities.

I don't want to go and ask anything extra of communities until we 
(OSGeo-Live) have a clear understanding about what we are asking for and 
what our complete plan is. Once we have our house in order, we will be 
in a better position to ask others to support us.


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Director
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

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