Petition for Relicensing http://learn.perl.org/ and other Perl Sites Under a Less Restrictive Licence

[Shlomi Fish]

Dear Karen,

I am hereby asking you to consider relicensing the content of
http://learn.perl.org/ and other perl.org sites, which is currently under
the restrictive Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NonDerivatives
licence ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ ) under a less
restrictive licence, to allow for maximum reuse, redistribution and building
upon, which in turn will help promote the Perl 5 and Perl 6 programming
language and ecosystem.

I do not know what the reasons were for choosing CC-by-nc-nd out of all
the Creative Commons licences, but it is prohibitive for reusing the content of
the Perl sites. As an anecdote, I was told that the Israeli government releases
its photos under a very restrictive (All Rights Reserved) licence, because they
are afraid people will misuse them. And guess what? People don't misuse them,
but they don't use them either. On the other hand, Al Jazeera releases its
photos under CC-by and as a result they are featured all over the Internet and
beyond, which really contributes to anti-Israeli advocacy.

If the distinguished members of the advo...@perl.org mailing list (CCed to
this message) agree with this, I am asking them to at least reply with a "+1".
If they disagree, please say so.

(I've made a similar request in a previous context, but it was as part of a
larger request.).

There are some very large sites that are under CC-by or CC-by-sa and they only
seem to benefit from it:

* http://www.wikimedia.org/

* http://www.wikia.com/

* http://stackoverflow.com/ | http://stackexchange.com/

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

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[Leo Lapworth]

Hi Shlomi,

On 28 December 2012 09:22, Shlomi Fish <shl...@shlomifish.org> wrote:
> Dear Karen,
>
> I am hereby asking you to consider relicensing the content of
> http://learn.perl.org/ and other perl.org sites

Please direct your request here:

https://github.com/perlorg/perlweb/issues

Might also be worth saying which licence you are actually
suggesting instead. I'm not sure your example is a good
one, as the content is not under 'All Rights Reserved'.

It is primarily up to Robert and Ask who own Perl.org, I will
let them respond to you through there.

Thanks

Leo

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Leo,

On Fri, 28 Dec 2012 12:31:53 +0000
Leo Lapworth <l...@cuckoo.org> wrote:

> Hi Shlomi,
>
> On 28 December 2012 09:22, Shlomi Fish <shl...@shlomifish.org> wrote:
> > Dear Karen,
> >
> > I am hereby asking you to consider relicensing the content of
> > http://learn.perl.org/ and other perl.org sites
>
> Please direct your request here:
>
> https://github.com/perlorg/perlweb/issues
>

I will thanks.

> Might also be worth saying which licence you are actually
> suggesting instead. I'm not sure your example is a good
> one, as the content is not under 'All Rights Reserved'.
>

It's not under All Rights Reserved, but CC-by-nc-nd does still prevent a lot of
common use and it's something we'd like to avoid.

I think CC-by or CC-by-sa will be very good licences for the content to be
under, while CC-by-nc and CC-by-nc-sa will still be better than the status quo.
There are some other options mentioned here:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

But I'll write it there.

> It is primarily up to Robert and Ask who own Perl.org, I will
> let them respond to you through there.
>

Thanks!

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

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[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Leo (and all),

On Fri, 28 Dec 2012 15:57:05 +0200
Shlomi Fish <shl...@shlomifish.org> wrote:

> Hi Leo,
>
> On Fri, 28 Dec 2012 12:31:53 +0000
> Leo Lapworth <l...@cuckoo.org> wrote:
>
> > Hi Shlomi,
> >
> > On 28 December 2012 09:22, Shlomi Fish <shl...@shlomifish.org> wrote:
> > > Dear Karen,
> > >
> > > I am hereby asking you to consider relicensing the content of
> > > http://learn.perl.org/ and other perl.org sites
> >
> > Please direct your request here:
> >
> > https://github.com/perlorg/perlweb/issues
> >
>
> I will thanks.
>

Done:

https://github.com/perlorg/perlweb/issues/63

Regards,

Shlomi Fish


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[brian d foy]

In article <20121228112...@lap.shlomifish.org>, Shlomi Fish

<shl...@shlomifish.org> wrote:


> I am hereby asking you to consider relicensing the content of
> http://learn.perl.org/ and other perl.org sites, which is currently under
> the restrictive Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NonDerivatives
> licence ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ ) under a less
> restrictive licence, to allow for maximum reuse, redistribution and building
> upon, which in turn will help promote the Perl 5 and Perl 6 programming
> language and ecosystem.

I've never heard anyone complain that they stopped advocating Perl
because of a license issue.

I'd rather see people make new content to add to the old content. For
any content that I've generated, I want the licenses to stay the same.

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi brian,

I think you're missing the point here. People won't likely completely stop
advocating Perl, but there are a few risks here. One of them is that people
won't contribute. Not everyone would want to fork the perl.org repository
and make pull requests only to have their content later licensed as CC-by-nc-nd,
which they often find unacceptable. I'm not sure one can even legally fork and
modify such a repository due to the Non-Derivatives licence. On the other hand,
with http://perl-begin.org/ , you can take
https://bitbucket.org/shlomif/perl-begin , fork/clone it , modify it to your
heart's content, and then set up http://not-perl-begin.com/ which would be
similar to http://perl-begin.org/ , and as long as they provide a clickable
link to http://perl-begin.org/ and otherwise provide the necessary attribution,
it will be perfectly OK by me[1]. But you cannot do that with
http://www.perl.org/ , and people will feed bad about contributing to something
that they and other people cannot benefit from after that.

Do you think the Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects would be as large as
they are today if they were under an -ND licence? Do you think perl or CPAN
would be? Part of the reasons why open content works is for the same reason
that open source works - because every one can benefit from it.

Right now on https://github.com/perlorg/perlweb/issues/63 , the main argument
that Ask (ABH) gave on his last comment was that he's afraid spammers and other
Internet low-life will build upon this content for their stuff. Well, spammers
(being scam) often don't respect text under restrictive, non-redistributable,
licences (nicknamed “All Rights Reserved” or “ARR” in Creative Commons speak),
and will likely have no problems with CC-by-nc-nd. Furthermore, even if they set
up link farms based on 100% public domain content, it would still be unethical,
something that many ISPs, hosting providers and search engines. won't favour and
will take down, and often illegal.

On the other hand, like I said, making something CC-by-nc-nd deters people
from contributing, building upon, forking, and in general “remixing” the
content. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_%28book%29

Part of my motivation for the request was in hope to put the first edition of
the book /Beginning Perl/ under a less restrictive licence, but as one comment
there says this is up to Apress, but relicensing *.perl.org under a less
restrictive licence would still be a step in the right direction.

Hope that helps.

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

{{{
[1] - some people cannot even get the attribution part of the CC licences right,
but that's a different issue.

}}}

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