[freeroleplay] Re: Generics
- From: Ricardo Gladwell <ax0n@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: freeroleplay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 10:43:34 +0100
Per I. Mathisen wrote:
> In the draft, they have introduced a way to mix different CC licenses. You
> can add any license restriction that exists within the CC domain to any
> existing CC license. So eg any CC SA (share-alike) content can be
> relicensed as CC SA+NC (non-commercial), which in my view totally defeats
> the entire point of making it CC SA in the first place.
That is a serious issue indeed. Do you have any links to places where this
is being discussed? I'd like to learn more.
> Surely you consider the attribution license also free?
Good point.
>>However, none of the CC licenses require a modifiable copy
>>of the content and therefore cannot be considered free.
>
> Well, then we disagree here on the interpretation of the CC SA, as we
> discussed earlier. I think the CC SA forbids distribution in such formats.
True, we do disagree. However, there are some other issues regarding the CC
licenses. It is a little known fact that "Creative Commons" is a
trademarked term and all CC licenses come with a statement asserting that
the CC trademark may only be used "for the limited purpose of indicating to
the public that the Work is licensed under the CCPL", elimanating any other
legal uses by which a trademark could be used and prohibiting the freedom
of using the content.
Besides that, the CC is otherwise a very free license. If we ever drop the
restriction to have a modifiable copy we would consisder moving over to the
CCPL, although the issues surrounding the CC trademark and the 2.0 would
have to be resovled first.
> The GPL is not an option, as I am working on a software library for
> Generics which is LGPL, and I do not want questions raised on that point.
> Licensing a text under LGPL strikes me as rather odd (dynamically linking
> text to other texts? ehhhm).
Examining one of the first line:
"A "library" means a collection of software functions and/or data prepared
so as to be conveniently linked with application programs (which use some
of those functions and data) to form executables."
It becomes clear the LGPL cannot be applied to documents.
As you say, what is the textual equivalent of dynamically linked text. This
is something that actually isn't addressed by the FSF or even the FDL: I
suppose the equivalent 'compatability licenses' that you see some
roleplaying games publishers licensing their works under, where you do not
have permission to use the rules, but you are permitted to produce new
material compatible with the rules. I'm not sure the FRPGC would support
such licenses.
Another alternative would be to license your document under the FDL/GPL and
publish the code seperately under the LGPL. This would still mean that
someone could come along and write the equivalent of your code under the
FDL/GPL using your documents, but they can do that regardless of whether
you publish under the CCPL, FDL, GPL or public domain.
> Open content licensing is such a troubled place these days. I think those
> who release works meant for contributions from other people nowadays
> should add an additional license along the lines of "The original author
> is given the right to license the work under a new license at any time",
> to be able to relicense the works to any new content licenses that might
> become popular. Since it is an additional license (a dual license), it can
> be removed by others at any time, if they decide they don't trust the
> original author.
I know what you mean. There are a growing number of open (few can be
considered free) content licenses and each seems to be imcompatible with
the rest. Most are often very complicated or with widely different terms.
I'm not sure about your suggestions about allowing anyone to republish your
work under any new license. Surely, it would be more riskier than trusting
your work to a single group of license publishers? After all, what is to
stop someone publishing your work under a far worse license. At least the
license publishers are somewhat constrained to have a degree of backward
compatability and continuity with their old licenses.
If you are worred about license publishers then you can either publish
under a specific version of a license only (GPL version 2.0 for example) or
you smiply release your work in the public domain as you originally suggested.
Kind regards...
--
Ricardo Gladwell
President, Free Roleplaying Community
http://www.freeroleplay.org/
president@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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