[Textbook-l] License issues

[Daniel Mayer]

Jimbo said:
>...
>The Creative Commons licenses are 
>much simpler.

I don't know about that (I just read a few) but dual licensing might be a nice 
option to have (thus making our text usable in other Creative Commons works). 
However everything on our server would have to be dual licensed or we would 
have a situation where some parts of some modules are dual licensed and other 
parts are either GNU FDL or Creative Commons. It is difficult enough already 
to convince outside authors to allow us to use their work under /one/ 
license. Of course I could be misunderstanding how dual-licensing works. 
Maybe we should talk to the Mozilla people about how they deal with their 
dual-license. It would also be nice to know what RMS thinks about 
dual-licensing in general and the specific Creative Common licenses that we 
might use in particular. 

>I believe that the 'Attribution-Share Alike' 
>license or the 'Share Alike' license is going 
>to be the right one to use if we did choose 
>to go that route.

Attribution-Share Alike seems to be most consistent with the GNU FDL. For 
"Attribution" we can have the same simple policy as we have on WIkipedia; a 
url to the original. 

>Actually, what I think we should do, from the 
>outset, is dual-license everything under both 
>licenses.  That ensures that the text is
>compatible with Wikipedia.

But dual-licensing may create a big problem with text flowing from Wikipedia 
(GFDL only) to a textbook (GFDL/Creative Commons Share Alike). Wouldn't each 
and every author of the Wikipedia text have to agree to have their work 
licensed under the Creative Commons Share Alike license? If not then we are 
going to make things rather difficult for downstream users of the our text 
who would have to sort out which licenses apply to various modules and parts 
of modules. Only having one license would be simpler, no?

>It's a bit late for Wikipedia proper to do 
>much good with dual licensing, but for 
>textbooks, it might be a good idea to do 
>it from the outset.

I like the idea but I have some reservations.

Creative Commons Share Alike license:

Require attribution? 
X Yes
    No

Allow commercial uses of your work? 
X Yes
   No
 
Allow modifications of your work? 
   Yes
X Yes, as long as others share alike 
    No

Which results in:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/legalcode

--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)