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

[Simon Cropper]

On 13/07/11 16:52, Simon Cropper wrote:
> On 13/07/11 12:09, Simon Cropper wrote:
>> 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.
>
> A researcher from Queensland University of Technology (one of the main 
> groups behind CC in Australia) has said that he was not aware of any 
> published data but he thought that work had been done in the past and 
> he will try and dig it up.
>

Cameron,

After spending several days on this matter I get the distinct feeling 
that the reason why compatibility matrices don't exist is that most of 
the open content licenses are incompatible in some way.

Check out...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License#Compatibility_with_Creative_Commons_licensing_terms

Which states "GFDL is not compatible with the Creative Commons 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons> Attribution-ShareAlike 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_licenses> license", which 
is the closest CC license to this copyleft license.

So projects like GRASS GIS and Mapblender that use this license for 
their documentation can not have the text from those documents used in a 
derivative licensed under the 'non-copyleft' CC-BY, let alone the 
'copyleft' version CC-BY-SA.

If you read the code of other Open Content licenses you find various 
condition or constraints that make it impossible to use documents 
licensed in this way in derivatives licensed in any other license type 
-- essentially resulting in documents being unable to be developed.

I will keep my ear to the ground but my general feeling is pick a 
license group (e.g. CC vs GFDl vs OCL/OPL), then get everyone to use 
that license type. For your project Creative Commons appears to already 
be the preferred option.

In the 'how to contribute' part of the LiveDVD you should emphasis that 
only material under a suitable CC license or in the public domian can be 
used in creation of derivatives to be distributed with this product, 
unless they are covered by the fair use conditions of most copyright 
acts. You can point to the CC-to-CC compatability matrix I pointed you 
to to inform people of general rules like "CC-BY-SA can not be used in 
CC-BY derivatives". All other works should be cited, referenced or 
linked to, or at best "quoted" if small portions of text are needed (as 
per fair use).

-- 
Cheers Simon

    Simon Cropper
    Principal Consultant
    Botanicus Australia Pty Ltd
    PO Box 160, Sunshine, VIC
    W:www.botanicusaustralia.com.au

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