Licenses

[Theo Armour]

Hello Everybody

 

Note change in subject of this email to reflect more clearly the particular topic at hand.

 

I have some but not a lot of knowledge in this area. I helped Professor Lawrence Lessig with his web site for a few years. Lessig was the founder of Creative Commons.

 

Text and Image Licenses

Creative Commons (CC) prepares a range of licenses from highly loose to highly restrictive.

 

It's probably a good thing to look at major users of CC licenses to see what they do,

 

Given that patterns are likely to be created and edited by large numbers of people over long periods of time – a likely equivalent situation is Wikipedia.

 

The licensing – and specific CC type for general Wikipedia articles is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License

 

Terms are discussed in more detail here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use . Basically everybody agrees to the same license. This makes sense especially when multiple authors work on the same sentence.

 

Software Application Licenses

The license for the Wikimedia software (and for software in general) is quite different. The software uses the GNU General Public License: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/License. This license is great for FOSS apps but an anathema to commercial developers because any derivative products must also be open source.

 

Software licenses are covered here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_license

 

And compared here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_licenses

 

A popular FOSS license is the MIT license which is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_license . The MIT license is quite loose and permits reuse within proprietary software

 

**

 

I hope this helps.

 

Lev: any thoughts on the two licensing issues? Anything I can clarify or focus on?

 

Theo Armour

 

 

 

 

From: pattern-rep...@googlegroups.com [mailto:pattern-rep...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Eliezer Israel
Sent: Monday, April 02, 2012 2:24 PM
To: pattern-rep...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: A First Repository

 

I would think that the various Creative Commons licenses offer enough alternatives to satisfy the majority of potential contributors. 

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

For a person's own original pattern work, I anticipate letting them choose. 

Interested in what people would suggest for a licensing model for material that people contribute to existing patterns.

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 5:19 PM, Ward Cunningham <wa...@c2.com> wrote:

On Apr 2, 2012, at 2:10 PM, Eliezer Israel wrote:

My intent is to create a workspace that will use a fair-use-compliant skeleton of the original APL patterns to provide structure for a workspace that will allow users to comment, upload photos for and against, and link to projects and examples that use the patterns.  In moving toward 2 or 3, I'll be willing to upload any other body of pattern work (under any reasonable license), and will provide tools for users to upload patterns as well. 

 

How about a Creative Commons license on this work so we don't have to go around this again five years from now?

 

[Michael Mehaffy]

If I understand Ward's thinking on this as I have heard him say it, the main incentive is not to retain rights of exclusive use (at least not for those elements that are made shareable) but to have acknowledgment of having done the work. 

There IS a "proprietary" side to many projects, of course, as discussed -- but I wonder if there should not be a clear line (fire wall) between the domains of what is kept proprietary and what is shared, so that there is not a vastly complex system of restricted rights, getting every project into a hopeless tangle?  

Ward, any thoughts?

Cheers, m

--
Michael Mehaffy

Structura Naturalis Inc.

742 SW Vista Ave., #42

Portland, OR 97205

(503) 250-4449
www.tectics.com

[Ward Cunningham]

I agree with the CC-BY-SA license. Its how we raise our children:

Creative Commons: When you're grown, I want you to be free to do your own good,

Attribution: But don't forget from where you came,

Share Alike: And do for your children as I have done for you.

The SA provision is defense against the "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" strategy. Some would argue that it prevents serious investment in a work as it blocks some possible returns. Wikipedia has shown that a work can succeed in spite of this handicap. I would argue for SA's necessity for lasting works intended to serve a community.

Best regards. -- Ward

[Ward Cunningham]

On Apr 3, 2012, at 7:38 AM, Michael Mehaffy wrote:

There IS a "proprietary" side to many projects, of course, as discussed

I may have missed this discussion.

I would encourage anyone participating in a community to keep their proprietary content to themselves.

Here is Wikimedia Common's advice to contributors:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Contributing_your_own_work

They make the SA (the "viral" share-alike property) optional.

[Michael Mehaffy]

Ward, 

Yes, that was really my point too.  Not to confound the sharing process with commingled rights that are retained, which would create a tangle.

This doesn't mean there aren't still proprietary capabilities, eg. to become a consultant on the work you've created and shared.  (The Linux-Red Hat model...)

Cheers, m

[Theo Armour]

Hello Everybody

 

Does anybody have a thoughts or comments regarding licenses for the software or apps that might be developed around a new pattern repository?

 

Theo

[Eliezer Israel]

In the case of the community authored components - be they textual, or even something like a community developed 3d model, I'm weighing between CC-BY and CC-BY-SA.  With the 'Share Alike' component of the license, I have one concern.  If someone were to develop a software product (say a 3d modeler) that uses content from the repository, would a CC-BY-SA license restrict them from selling the software product?  If so, than I would say that it is too restrictive. 

Regarding 'atomic' contributions - those that a single person/entity contributes and that aren't directly subject to group development (e.g. images, 3d models, blueprints for existing buildings) - I'm thinking that a flickr-type model, where the contributor chooses the license they are comfortable with (or that the material already holds) would be the appropriate model.

Theo - you mentioned Lawrence Lessig.  I'm a huge fan.  I know that he's all engines go on reforming congressional funding law these days, but if there's any way to get him to weigh in on the fair-use question we have around APL, that would be awesome.  He has to be one of the leading legal scholars on questions of fair use.

Lev