Comments on: A Licence Odyssey

By: Ken

Ken — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:51:36 +0000

Artists /authors produce a large piece of work that can be copied with a few key strokes, and any hope of their income is gone. Programmers are releasing under GPL because they have seen code useful to them lost from use, or have lost code from use from proprietary lisencencing. They realize that they will not make money as a small software company. They have money from a well paid day job in IT.
Artists make less than programmers, they don’t have a day job in art so they cannot give away their only income. Even if they don’t sell it they need their name out there for promotion and recognition. If someone steals your idea and publishes it widely before you are noticed you loose. Ken

By: Sridhar Dhanapalan

Sridhar Dhanapalan — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:35:54 +0000

Craptaculus,

Because I want people to give back to the community on the same terms which they got my work. I don’t want my work stolen and used under different terms.

IMHO Public Domain and the BSD licences are tantamount to anarchy. They may be open to begin with, but there’s nothing to keep them open.

By: Adhemar

Adhemar — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 20:27:43 +0000

I understand your arguments against the Creative Commons licences marked Non-Commercial and/or No-Derivative-Works. But I don’t quite see your problem with the Creative Commons licenses marked Attribution. Actually, there used to be Creative Commons (version 1) licences without the Attribution requirement, but almost nobody used those, so the CC organisation no longer maintains them.

There is a huge difference between the original BSD licence and the Creative Commons Attribution licence. The problem with the original BSD licence is that it required that “all advertising materials mentioning features or use” of the work and its derivatives to display an acknowledgement; whereas CC-BY (and CC-BY-SA) only requires acknowledgement (and intact copyright notices) on the work itself and its derivatives. That is far less obnoxious.

Even GPLv3, while it does not include an Attribution clause itself, explicitly allows supplementing GPLv3 with an additional clause “requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it”.

Compared to GFDL, the Attribution clause of CC-BY is also very light. CC-BY only requires keeping acknowledgement (and intact copyright notices); GFDL requires keeping far more: complete “Invariant sections”, cover texts, dedications, … That is, as you point out, one of the reasons Debian dislikes GFDL.

[This post is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike version 2.0 Belgium licence – Adhemar, 2008.]

By: Wolfger

Wolfger — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 19:40:54 +0000

“Is there a reason why creators of non-code works don’t feel the same sense of community as coders? Why the strong need for recognition?”

Yes. Because people generally don’t go around looking for code written by a particular hacker, but they most certainly do go looking for art by the same artist or books by the same author. Recognition is *everything* in those fields. The day a novel is written by as many different people as have had there hands in the Linux kernel is the day that will change. (i.e. there’s no author credits at all on the dictionary)

By: Benjamin A'Lee

Benjamin A'Lee — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 19:05:36 +0000

“Not me!”, all the things that are (sic)-ed are American English (mis)spellings - license, center rather than British/International English licence, centre.

By: Craptaculus

Craptaculus — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 16:51:38 +0000

If you want it open, why not just say: “All text is hereby placed into the public domain” and be done with it? Why try to restrict it with a license?

By: Not me!

Not me! — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 16:39:27 +0000

I am interested and intruiged at what possessed you to (sic) all of those things? As far as I can tell, there’s no reason for… any of them. But I could be wrong. It’ll just bug me until I know.

By: Benjamin A'Lee

Benjamin A'Lee — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:11:57 +0000

I believe the GNU FDL is considered free by Debian in certain situations - that is, if there are no front-cover or back-cover texts and no invariant sections. Nevertheless, I’d choose the GPL, since AFAIK the FDL isn’t actually compatible with the GPL.

By: Sridhar Dhanapalan

Sridhar Dhanapalan — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:35:06 +0000

Hi Jasso,

As mentioned in one of the pages linked in the article:

“This is a free and copyleft license meant for artistic works. It permits commercial distribution, but any larger work including the copylefted work must be free. Please don’t use it for software or documentation, since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL.”

I don’t think I’m willing to use a licence that is incompatible with the GPL or at least the GNU FDL.

Cheers, Sridhar

By: Jasso

Jasso — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:26:45 +0000

Have you considered the free art license - what are the good sides and shortcomings of it? I have heard that as a copyleft license it is in a way the GPL for art, but I am not familiar with this license myself. The name suggests that it is created for non-code work but this might not be useful for text based works like documentation.

Oh yeah, the obligatory URL of the license http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/