License change: CC-BY?

[eah13]

Hilmar sent a well-reasoned email to the group (below) suggesting that CC-By be the default for all Comp-core code projects. I tend to agree. This issue is to reference in a pull request; please discuss further in our google group.

For the record, I chose CC-BY-NC-SA to start because that's what the Pi educational manual uses. But I imagine they were trying to prevent someone from publishing and charging for a book. Our code doesn't need the same protections.

---

Great to see these come online! As I assume this is just the beginning, perhaps now is the best time to address the content licensing question. Specifically, why was a content license with a NC clause (non-commercial) chosen?

There are lots of issues with the NC clause, in part because it is incompatible with CC-BY (and thus, for example, Wikipedia) and the OSI licenses (even if those are for source code - but part of this endeavor will result in source code, and having code and text content under incompatible licenses seems at least odd, and potentially prone to all kinds of problems and confusion). Another part is that what is non-commercial is poorly defined (even if CC's 4.0 version will make an attempt to define this better, it will still be a while until 4.0 is around). Yet another part is that precluding commercial partners from the outset is rarely a good idea.

So NC really is stifling reuse, not promoting it, and arguably so is the SA clause. Any reason this can't just be CC-BY, as is for example all content of the PLOS journals?

-hilmar

Some material on the NC discussion:

Hagedorn, Gregor, Daniel Mietchen, Robert Morris, Donat Agosti, Lyubomir Penev, Walter Berendsohn, and Donald Hobern. 2011. “Creative Commons Licenses and the Non-commercial Condition: Implications for the Re-use of Biodiversity Information.” ZooKeys 150 (November 28): 127. doi:10.3897/zookeys.150.2189.

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0/NonCommercial

http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/defining-noncommercial/Defining_Noncommercial_fullreport.pdf

http://www.oerafrica.org/copyright/CreativeCommonsIntroduction/Criticismsofthenoncommercialclause/tabid/1282/Default.aspx