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The Media Your Rights Online

Creative Commons Launches Version 4.0 of Its Licenses 47

Posted by timothy from the good-news-about-fine-print dept.
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."
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Creative Commons Launches Version 4.0 of Its Licenses More

Creative Commons Launches Version 4.0 of Its Licenses

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  • Good (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Thursday November 28, 2013 @07:49PM (#45551917) Journal

    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: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It has way too much popularity in the majority of software out there.

      What is "way too much" popularity? Choose the license that you prefer and stop complaining about others' choices.

      My software, my rules.

    • Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)

      by QuasiSteve ( 2042606 ) on Thursday November 28, 2013 @08:18PM (#45552037)

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

      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/ [choosealicense.com]

    • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Yvanhoe ( 564877 ) on Thursday November 28, 2013 @09:27PM (#45552257) Journal
      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... ;-)
      • Unless you really loath some aspect of every common license out there, that isn't the part of your project that you want to DIY... Unless you are atypically lucky, and good, you'll just get something 95% equivalent to an existing license, incompatible with virtually everything, and sufficiently ill-drafted to be unenforceable in some surprising number of jurisdictions.

        Plus, the last thing that the world needs is yet more legal scrabble that nobody reads.

    • Re:BSD-bad, MIT-good (Score:5, Informative)

      by Chemisor ( 97276 ) on Thursday November 28, 2013 @09:31PM (#45552269)

      > 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 [gnu.org], 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: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Billly Gates ( 198444 )

        Stallman opposes companies and anyone wanting to make a living writing software when he bashes tax payer funded code with forcing corps who also pay taxes from not using it.

        You can mod me down or call me what you like but it is fact that if I want to buy a mac (I hate Apple but for the sake of argument) and there is a cool piece of software then I can not have it. Why? If Apple does one include statement in c++ that includes a header that is GNU then the whole thing has to be free as well which is why criti

        • Re:BSD-bad, MIT-good (Score:5, Informative)

          by femtobyte ( 710429 ) on Thursday November 28, 2013 @11:33PM (#45552665)

          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.

          • If its linked dynamically or statically anywhere then that must be opened too. Read the license?

            Developers are so uninformed on this. Its why Iced Tea had to include a classpath exception or Redhat and its customers couldnt use it.

            • Re:BSD-bad, MIT-good (Score:5, Insightful)

              by femtobyte ( 710429 ) on Thursday November 28, 2013 @11:58PM (#45552739)

              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."

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
            Comment removed based on user account deletion

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward

              Uhm, aren't you simply in denial of reality here?
              Red Hat makes more than a billion on FOSS. Canonical is currently positive, which means gaining back what they've lost of Shuttleworth's money is simply a matter of time. Desktop Linux is constantly growing... and will do so at an accelerated rate once it becomes more relevant for gaming (Steam OS, plus an increasing number of game developers porting). And then there's business Linux, Mobile, HPC, home servers, ... many areas where it is already dominating la

              • Red Hat makes more than a billion on FOSS.

                And they do this by targeting corporate desktops and servers, making money on services. Did you read the post to which you are replying?

            • Ooookay, then explain EXACTLY how I'm supposed to make money when somebody can give away my work for free and there ain't a damned thing I can do about it?

              Just like a mechanic does: You want to make money. You do a bid for a prospective customer. You agree on a price. You do the work ONCE. You get paid for the work you did ONCE. The difference is that a mechanic's work benefits one car, and one driver; The whole world can benefit from your efforts if you create free software. Note that there is no coin slot on your ignition switch so that the mechanic can extract a fee for each time you benefit from their work...

              Copyright creates artificial scarcity. T

              • Just like a mechanic does: You want to make money. You do a bid for a prospective customer. You agree on a price. You do the work ONCE. You get paid for the work you did ONCE. The difference is that a mechanic's work benefits one car, and one driver; The whole world can benefit from your efforts if you create free software. Note that there is no coin slot on your ignition switch so that the mechanic can extract a fee for each time you benefit from their work...

                The only time a software developer is getting p

              • Just like a mechanic does: You want to make money. You do a bid for a prospective customer. You agree on a price. You do the work ONCE. You get paid for the work you did ONCE. The difference is that a mechanic's work benefits one car, and one driver; The whole world can benefit from your efforts if you create free software.

                You are missing his point. It being - if he sells his software to Dick, and Dick starts distributing it for free to everybody, then there are 2 suppliers of the same software in the market - him, and Dick. He sells it for, say $50, while Dick just either offers it as a free download, or sells it for $5 (including s&h). Everybody knows that it's available from both him & Dick. Who do you think they'd buy it from?

                What GPL - any version - does is ensure that any software under it can practically

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DrXym ( 126579 )
            For the most part I agree, but the GPLv3 is positively toxic for certain kinds of deployment such as set top boxes.

      • I personally prefer the ISC license: http://opensource.org/licenses/ISC [opensource.org]

        Specifically because it does not have the advertising clause - i.e. I do NOT want 3rd parties to be using my company name in their advertising.

        *--jeffk++

        • I second the ISC license and use it whenever I'm not using the GPL. The ISC is also the shortest which means people might actually be able to read and understand it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        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.

        OTOH, that advertising clause makes it useful i

    • Like to see alternatives to GNU.

      You probably mean GPL.

  • Does anyone know where to find plaintext versions of the 4.0 licenses?

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