Re: CC-BY : "clarification letter" ?
Daniel Carrera <dcarrera@math.umd.edu> writes:
> Andrew Suffield wrote:
>> That doesn't make any sense. Why are you limited to this ridiculous
>> pair of licenses?
>
> Because OpenOffice.org is very slow at approving anything. Getting
> anything changed is difficult and takes time. Before, the only license
> allowed for documentation was the PDL. Recently, we approved the CC-BY. I
> think that the CC-BY is better than the PDL, so I want to take it.
How about dual licensing? License it under both the GPL (or whatever
license the software you're documenting uses -- see below) and the
CC-by. Surely they wouldn't have an issue with that -- they still have
it under the CC-by. But others (like Debian) would also have it under a
license they can accept.
> This doesn't preclude the probability of there ever being another license.
> I expect there will be. But that will not be for a long time.
The problem is that by that time the list of contributors could be huge,
and it would be quite tough to contact them all and get them to agree to
a license change. But if you dual license now, when the time comes that
you can switch entirely to your preferred license, you quietly drop the
CC-by with no extra fuss. Switching licenses is *hard* when you have a
lot of contributors to contact and get approval from.
As for which other license to use, think about the possibility that you
will want your license to be compatible with that of the software you
document. Someone down the road may want to use excerpts from your
documentation as context help, or something like that. If the licenses
are incompatible that may not be possible -- at least not without
jumping some legal hoops.
--
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
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