At present the state-of-the-art Creative Commons licenses are at version 2.5 and now we begin the public process of making the transition to version 3. There are four main reasons for this move:
(a) Incorporate MIT negotiated amendments to all licenses (incl. Sampling) to enable MIT to switch over to using a standard CC BY-NC-SA license.
(b) Incorporate Debian negotiated amendments in the hope that they will declare some of our licenses (those without the NonCommercial and NoDerivatives license elements) â??freeâ?? according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
(c) Spin off the current â??genericâ?? license to be the US license & (hopefully) create a real generic license.
(d) For those jurisdictions that protect the moral right of integrity, (i) incorporate an icon signifying the retention of this important right in the Commons Deed and, (ii) to ensure that the Legal Code for all of these jurisdictions expressly retains the right of integrity.
These are all important reasons but I am particularly interested in the moral rights (d) issue (maybe becuase I am from a jurisdiction which has moral rights) and the chance of being recognised as “free” according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (b) because it is important to interact with the Free Software movement in a deeper way. The Free Software movement not only predates CC it remains the most stringent among the movements which most people carelessly lump together as Open Source. For a longer discussion on this and the meaning of free software look here.
Do you want to participate in the process? Here is how…
It’s that fun time again when we start contemplating versioning up the licenses. An outline of why we’re thinking about doing this and how CC proposes to do this has just been posted to the cc-licenses list. Please participate in the discussions on the cc-licenses list – you can sign up here.
Submitted by Mia Garlick on 2006-05-17 04:07 PM.