[tei-council] Fwd: TEI licensing issues

[Piotr Bański]

On 13/09/11 12:13, Laurent Romary wrote:
> Are we slowly going CC-BY? What do the others think? 

Or are we going CC0? That would at least allow for compatibility with
the GPL, at the cost of giving up copyright.

Or are we going *BSD?


On the assumption that we want to retain compatibility with GPL, i.e.
that we do not want to go from being GPL-ed to cutting off half of the
free/open software world, the points below may be worth considering.


1. Glad I've found this essay, only scanned it so far:

http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html

from 4.6, links removed:
"Avoid using the “Creative Commons” licenses for software. The Creative
Commons FAQ says, “Creative Commons licenses are not intended to apply
to software. They should not be used for software... [they don’t
distinguish, as needed,] between object and source code... We strongly
encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses available
today [instead].” Jay Tuley’s “5 reasons to not choose a CC license for
code” explains more. The debian-legal Summary of Creative Commons 2.0
Licenses recommends that authors who wish to create works compatible
with Debian’s “Debian Free Software Guidelines” should not use any of
the licenses in the Creative Commons license suite; licenses with the
“NonCommercial” or “NoDerivs” license elements are fundamentally
incompatible with FLOSS, authors who use or are planning to use the
Attribution 2.0 license should consider a similar Free Software license
such as a BSD- or MIT-style license..., and Authors who use or are
planning to use the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license should consider a
similar Free Software license such as the GNU General Public License
[GPL]. The Creative Commons has “wrapped” the GPL and LGPL if you want
to use the Creative Commons search engine."


2. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OtherLicenses

Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license (a.k.a. CC BY)

    This is a non-copyleft free license that is good for art and
entertainment works, and educational works. Please don't use it for
software or documentation, since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and
with the GNU FDL.


3. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses

CC0

    CC0 is a public domain dedication from Creative Commons. A work
released under CC0 is dedicated to the public domain to the fullest
extent permitted by law. If that is not possible for any reason, CC0
also provides a simple permissive license as a fallback. Both public
domain works and the simple license provided by CC0 are compatible with
the GNU GPL.

    If you want to release your work to the public domain, we recommend
you use CC0.


4. 3-clause BSD and FreeBSD licenses are listed as GPL-compatible as well.

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