Creative Commons Attribution

[Evan Prodromou]

So, the Creative Commons licenses are not OSI-approved:

    http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

I think there are two licenses that meet the Open Source Definition:
the Attribution license:

    http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

...and the Attribution-ShareAlike license:

    http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

(Why the other licenses would not be Open Source is left as an
exercise to the reader.)

In discussing this on the Creative Commons cc-licenses list, one
commenter thought that the Attribution license element* would not meet
the OSD.

    http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/2004-June/000898.html

The Attribution license element requires that the upstream creator's
copyright notices be kept intact; that their names or pseudonyms, if
provided, be included in the work where other authors' names are, as
best as possible for the medium; and that an URL for license and
copyright info be included.

(This is a summary, and the details are much better explained in the
legal text of the licenses, which can be found at the URLs above.
Some people compare this requirement to the notorious "obnoxious BSD
advertising clause". I disagree, at least about the obnoxious part,
but that's just me.)

ANYWAYS, my correspondent said that a previous license that had
similar attribution requirements was refused approval. My question to
the audience is: does anyone remember this incident? Is there
something about requiring attribution that's not OSD-compatible?

~ESP

* Creative Commons has a suite of licenses, with mix-and-match license
  elements.

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://wikitravel.org/en/
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