Creative Commons Launches Version 4.0 of Its Licenses

revealingheart writes "Creative Commons has launched new versions of their flexible copyright licenses, after two years of input. Changes include waiving database and moral rights where possible, and adjustments to attribution requirements. Licenses are now designed to work internationally by default."

Comments

Good

[Billly Gates]

Like to see alternatives to GNU. It has way too much popularity in the majority of software out there. Though the popular ones like X and Mozilla have their licenses. I like the BSD personally but would like to see more take off as well.

  I am aware CC is more common with literal works than source code but it can be applied to both.

Re:Good

[QuasiSteve]

It can be, but it's discouraged;
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F

There's plenty of free software licenses, libre and otherwise, open source and otherwise, you can choose from that have little to nothing to do with GNU (not sure if you're just referring to GPL there, or..)

Github suggests using this site, but there's other comparative / flowchart-based ones if you google about:
http://choosealicense.com/

Re:Good

[AIphaWolf_HK]

My equipment, my rules. To hell with copyright.

Re:Good

[Yvanhoe]

This is one case where competition is bad. It causes license fragmentation without adding anything to the community. CC is for works of art, designed for that and more likely to hold well in that case. GPL/LGPL/MIT/BSD are for software and are more likely to hold well in these cases. You should also consider public domain. It is a tested and proved "license" not very far from the BSD... ;-)

Re:BSD-bad, MIT-good

[Chemisor]

> I like the BSD personally but would like to see more take off as well.

Please don't use the BSD license. As Stallman has explained at length, its original version had the obnoxious advertising clause that made compliance very difficult for large projects. Even though there now is the "new style BSD" license, it is easy to confuse the two and mistakenly promote the old one. The MIT/X license is equivalent to the new BSD license and does not suffer from the confusion of multiple versions, so please use it instead of the BSD license.

Re:BSD-bad, MIT-good

[femtobyte]

There's nothing incompatible with making money from code and using GPL-licensed products. Apple, or anyone else, is perfectly free to sell products, for cash money, that use GPL products. The only "viral imposition" that the GPL requires is that Apple pass along the same benefits of freedom that they enjoyed in using someone else's GPL'd code to the people buying software from them. GPL doesn't mean you have to give away your code for free to anyone --- just that the people you do give it to, possibly for loads of money, get to see, modify, improve, and redistribute the stuff using GPL'd code.

Re:BSD-bad, MIT-good

[femtobyte]

Right, if your code is relying on the functionality that someone else generously gave you and the whole world to freely use, then you have to play nice and pass along the same freedoms that you're enjoying to link the GPL'd code's functionality into your product.

I see you mentioned RedHat --- for a company with over a billion dollars revenue, RH doesn't seem to be suffering too badly from the inability to make money while building on GPL'd products. They seem to have found plenty of ways to add enough value to convince people to pay them for a product that you can get for free through other channels (CentOS). None of their programmers are going home unpaid because of the "eeeevil profit-killing GPL."