After a lot of work and hard discussions Creative Commons now launches the fourth version of their licenses. From the CC blog
We proudly introduce our 4.0 licenses, now available for adoption worldwide. The 4.0 licenses — more than two years in the making — are the most global, legally robust licenses produced by CC to date. We have incorporated dozens of improvements that make sharing and reusing CC-licensed materials easier and more dependable than ever before.
Here is an interview with Jordan S. Hatcher on “Why we can’t use the same open licensing approach for databases as we do for content and software.”
The mission of Open Data Commons is to provide legal tools for open data, and we’ve produced two legal tools to date. We’re looking to expand our work to do more education and research around open data, as well as to build out a robust framework for the organisation and updating and maintaining the licenses. We’re very excited that the Open Street Map community is looking to adopt the Open Database License for their materials.
Finally finished the mind-numbingly boring work of reading proofs for a manual on the GPL license. It’s so boring that I have broken records in procrastination but today surrounded by loud music I stayed at home and finished. In front of me is my latest acquisitio, a color lithograph graphic by Claude Weisbuch which I brought home today.
While on the subject of art I cannot help but spreading this anecdote about Dali which I just read on _Paddy K_
Apparently Dali liked to eat out, with large groups of friends in tow, but was not so fond of paying the bill. So he made a point of paying using a check from his checkbook and, just before handing the check over, scribbled a little drawing on the back and signed it.
And now the owner, suddenly in possession of a signed Dali, would usually just frame it and hang it on the wall and show it to his friends instead of cashing it at the bank.
Sitting with licenses is sooo boring.
Sorry for the horrible abbreviations in the title!
Wikipedia is in the process of deciding to go from using the GNU Free Documentation License to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license. One of the reasons for this move is that the GNU Free Documentation License is less flexible to use for wikipedia. More information from the Creative Commons blog:
A community vote is now underway, hopefully one of the final steps in the process the migration of Wikipedia (actually Wikipedias, as each language is its own site, and also other Wikimedia Foundation sites) to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license.
This migration would be a huge boost for the free culture movement, and for Wikipedia and Creative Commons — until the migration happens there is an unnecessary licensing barrier between the most important free culture project (Wikipedia of course, currently under the Free Documentation License, intended for software documentation) and most other free culture projects and individual creators, which use the aforementioned CC BY-SA license.
To qualify to vote, one must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15. Make sure you’re logged in to the project on which you qualify, and you should see a site notice at the top of each page that looks like the image below (red outline added around notice).
Click on “vote now” and you’ll be taken to the voting site.
For background on the migration process, see Wikimedia’s licensing update article and the following series of posts on the Creative Commons blog:
- On being a creative commoner
- Wikipedia and attribution
- Wikipedia licensing Q&A posted
- Wikipedia/CC news: FSF releases FDL 1.3
- Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses released
- DRAFT Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses
- Approved for Free Cultural Works
- Wikipedia and Creative Commons next steps
- Progress on license interoperability with Wikipedia
Here’s a great “propaganda poster”, original created by Brianna Laugher (cited a number of times on this blog), licensed under CC BY. See her post, Vote YES for licensing sanity!
Indeed, please go vote yes to unify the free culture movement!
This is a bit of a late heads up but is interesting if you happen to be in Oslo this evening. Richard Stallman will give a talk on “Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks – Free software and beyond” at Storsalen, Chateau Neuf (Slemdalsveien 15), Oslo. He will be introduced by Gisle Hannemyr from the Department of Informatics, Gisle will also lead the discussion after the talk.
For those who are not able to leave our screens more information about video streaming is available here.
Bruce Perens has written an interesting article about combining GPL with proprietary software the main point of discussion concerns the problem of combining software under different licenses in embedded devices. The article ends with a paragraph on what not to do:
Don’t assume that you can put proprietary kernel drivers in a run-time loadable kernel module. The legality of such a practice is dubious, and there have not been sufficient cases to say reliably what would happen if you were to get sued.
Also, don’t look for, and use loopholes in the Open Source licenses. Nothing makes your company look worse than taking unfair advantage of people who provided their work to you without charge, expecting in good faith that you’d honor their license. It also tends to make Open Source folks reluctant to cooperate with your company, the next time you need help with their software. And it looks bad to judges, too.
Don’t try to do what I’ve discussed without legal counsel to advise and review your actions.
This is a particularly tricky subject and every time a writer tackles it we slowly move towards a better understanding – but there is still a long way to go. In fact that shortest answer to the problem of combining GPL & proprietary software in one device may be “don’t do it if you are not sure” but not many are going to follow that advice since free and open source software is too much of a competitive advantage for developers to ignore.
(via Slashdot)
Google has announced that it is enabling users to choose Creative Commons licenses in its Picasa Web Albums service. Users storing their photographs on Picasa can either license each photo individually or set a defualt license.
(via Creative Commons blog)
The Software Freedom Law Centre has put out a guide to help with GPL compliance. The guide is mainly for software vendors but it’s an interesting read for most of us interested in the topic.
A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance (August 26, 2008) is written by Bradley M. Kuhn, Aaron Williamson & Karen M. Sandler and is also available in a PDF or Postscript version.
