[License-discuss] Shortest copyleft licence

[Tzeng, Nigel H.]

On 4/1/15, 12:49 PM, "Rick Moen" <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:


>I should hasten to say that you have a very good point that the Creative
>Commons approach has merit, and I wrote my comment far too hastily.
>
>You're right; it would be a good thing if someone skilled in the art
>were to attempt that.  Short summaries of existing licences would be a
>fine start, though I could swear that there have been a few.

Yes.  There appeared to be a short lived effort to wrap software licenses
with CC like text at CC but that doesn¹t appear to have met much
success/interest.  Probably because it was seen as outside their swim lane
and the lack of CC branding on the licenses themselves.

I think that the branding of the CC-BY and CC-whatever has significant
value.  I used ³software commons² or ³SC² as an example as not to be too
blatantly suggestive but OSI-BY and OSI-BY-SA could have equal if not more
brand value within the software domain.

Have I read all the legalese behind the CC licenses?  No.  I trust the
brand and while I have perused some just as a sanity check I also realize
that I¹m not a lawyer and I would miss the nuances anyway.

So I depend that the CC organization has put forth a best effort in making
sure the human-readable summaries match the legal text.

>It should be remembered that the CC 'human-readable' summaries are not
>the operative texts, though.

That¹s true.  For professional work I would have our legal office
determine if it suitable for use.  For personal stuff, like I said, I
trust the brand so I mark my photos CC-BY-NC-SA.

>Fair enough.  I honestly wish people wouldn't get hung up on the
>manifestos, as they are NOOPs in the functioning of the legal
>instruments.  I tend to disregard them.

I dislike the presumption that the use of GPL implies support for the FSF
viewpoint.  A perspective that the FSF fosters as evidence of how much
they dominate the FOSS world as opposed to say BSD/Apache.

Yes, WE all know this is not true.