[Foundation-l] The license situation

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 5:33 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/10/19 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
>> 2008/10/19 Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>:
>>> If there is still a case to be made that adopting CC-BY-SA puts you in
>>> a substantially worse position than adopting GFDL if your aim is to
>>> protect your work with strong copyleft, I'd be really interested in a
>>> thorough argument to that effect.
>
>> The FSF tend to be ideologically driven but at least predictably so.
>> CC tend to be more pragmatic which makes them less predicable. We have
>> no reason to think that CC would opt for strong copyleft for images
>> unless they have made a clear direct commitment to do so. They have
>> not.
>
> The CC have the advantage of being present and active on our mailing lists.

Hi there. Erik and I (and others) have been discussing strong (or
stronger, eg use in any libre context as opposed to only in a context
with the same license) for some months. I owe some emails on this
right now...

IMO (non-lawyer) CC licenses aren't crystal clear on this now (look at
the examples enumerated in definitions of adaptations and
collections), and it just makes sense to clarify this in the direction
of stronger copyleft for images. It has taken me some years of
listening to arguments about this on various CC and WMF lists to come
to this conclusion, but in the end, it's pretty simple given typical
[re]use of photos -- if you don't want stronger copyleft, use CC BY or
CC BY-SA and make an exception for contextual use.

The above isn't a clear direct commitment to write strong copyleft for
images into CC BY-SA, sorry, but I hope it is a pretty clear
indicator. Assuming we do this, it will take some time to get to a new
version 3.x or 4.0 that explicitly includes strong copyleft for
images. In addition to getting to getting that just right, we have to
consider whether it impacts definitions in other CC licenses, and
probably much else (see IANAL above). And the last thing I'd want from
a trustworthy license steward is rapid change.

Mike
(For context I'm roughly Erik's peer at CC and have been the main
person working on getting more recognition of libre licenses and their
importance such as the BY-SA statement of intent previously mentioned
in this thread and the free cultural works branding now on libre CC
licenses.)