question about a project licensed under CC NC claiming to be open source

[Mark James]

On 06/24/10 02:14, Thomas Riboulet wrote:

> Following some links I found a gallery made in JS : http://highslide.com/
>
> the website is claiming that it's open source, yet the licence is Creative Commons non commercial 2.5 and I didn't find any link to the code except the actual js lib.
>
> I don't mind the commercial part but the "you need approval for commercial use" sounds more like the old shareware thing ...
>
> the CC NC license is not listed in the open source licenses, what is the stand of opensource.org in such a case ?
> and what action is possible towards this project to have them clarify the status of their software ?

Thomas, Highslide JS claims to be "open source" (common noun) rather than Open Source (proper noun, which implies use of 
an OSI-Certfied licence, which CC-BY-NC certainly isn't because it restricts use).

Their JavaScript code is indeed available unobfuscated, so their software meets the colloquial definition of "open 
source". However it would reduce ambiguity if they instead said "Highslide JS is a...whose source code is available, 
allowing easy inspection and modification".

Mark