[Foundation-l] Licensing for Dummies

[phoebe ayers]

On Dec 1, 2007 10:00 PM, Philippe Beaudette <philippebeaudette at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all -
>
> OK, I accept that I need to get copies of the various licenses and crash
> with them and dig into them.  Gottit.  It's on my "to-do" list for next
> week.
>
> Is there a good common reference that I can use in addition to that?  I'm
> thinking there must be someone who's already done this and has harnessed the
> (substantial) knowledge of this list and others to put them into a format
> that doesn't make my eyes glaze.  Does anyone have a reference that gives
> overviews of the various differences b/w the CC licenses, the GFDL, etc?
>
> Philippe


Yes! I'd love to have such a thing myself.

I found this:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/FOSS_Licensing -- which only covers software
licensing but is a nice ideological overview

and this:
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/lliang/open_content_guide
which does have a comparison chart, but is perhaps out of date.

we do have a free software license comparison:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_licences
but not one for free content licenses that I could turn up.

At any rate, above and beyond our current debate, it'd be lovely to have a
short compare-and-contrast reference that could be printed up into a few
pages, especially for talking to people who are new and not ideologically
invested, have something to license, and just want to know what the
possibilities are and what open licenses can do for them. I imagine someone
must have written up such a thing...  (that is one thing I admire about
Creative Commons -- from the end user's perspective they explain themselves
well and make it easy to understand what you're getting into).

-- phoebe