Re: Licensing: feedback wanted

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 9:16 AM, Chris Mills <cmills@opera.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 30 Nov 2011, at 13:35, Richard D. Worth wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:18 AM, Karl Dubost <karld@opera.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Le 30 nov. 2011 à 07:36, Chris Mills a écrit :
>> > shall we go with by-sa. or just by? I think by-sa is best, as I worry
>> what would happen to our material if we didn't include SA. We want the
>> material and any evolution of it to be open, surely?
>>
>>
>> We have a very similar case here. We want the content to be widespread by
>> people and reused be it in a commercial context and/or an open context. As
>> long as the source stays open, people have always the possibility to use
>> it. It's why I'm in favor of CC-BY
>>
>
> If we were authoring all the content ourselves, I think I could be in
> complete agreement, as CC-BY is most analogous to a permissive code
> license, such as MIT or BSD, which have shown to permit sufficient adoption
> and use (surely due in large part to their simplicity) amongst all the most
> popular JavaScript libraries for example (the software I'm most familiar
> with writing and licensing).
>
> However, deciding to license our content CC-BY would preclude us from
> using any content from MDN, as just one example. Is that worth it? I'm not
> sure it is.
>
>
> This is not necessarily the case - a licensor can waive certain license
> conditions if they see fit. And we are intending to talk to the different
> content holders about using their content on the site, rather than just
> using it and not telling them. This needed for etiquette and goodwill to be
> maintained.
>

Great!


>
> Of course, we could perhaps go with CC-BY-SA but then state clearly in the
> license material that if you want to use our material in a commercial
> project of some kind but don't want to put it under the same license, then
> contact us and we will review your particular case - if we approve then we
> will waive the -SA- condition?
>

We'd only be in a position to grant such a waiver if we had lined up
waivers from the above content holders. If we go through that effort, I'd
be just as happy having our license be CC-By from the start, but if there
were an overwhelming majority that wanted CC-By-SA as the default and CC-By
as an exception, I agree, this is a good way forward.

- Richard