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Software Government The Courts News

Creative Commons for Software? 36

Posted by Cliff from the mired-in-software-licenses dept.
rumint asks: "I am working on a software utility that I want to distribute freely. Unfortunately, there is a wide variety of nearly unintelligible software licenses (unless you are a lawyer). Of course there is the GPL, but I'm not sure it fits everyone's needs. Is there a Creative Commons equivalent for software licenses? If not, does some newly minted law school graduate want to put one together and contribute to humanity?"
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Creative Commons for Software? More

Creative Commons for Software?

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  • The BSD license lets people do pretty much whatever they want to with the code.

  • ugh no more license please (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @12:30AM (#13985827)
    Oh, come on now. Here's all you need to ask yourself:

    * Do you want to let people distribute your software any way they want, including with less flexible terms than you distribute it? Pick the BSD license.

    * Do you want to let people distribute your software any way they want, as * long as they grant others at least the same rights you granted them? Pick the GPL.

    That's it. Those are your two choices. These are well understood and are easy to read (the BSD is easy to read because it's short, and the GPL is easy to read because it was written to be easy to read, as well as legally sound). Everything else is just a waste of people's time.

    You can also trademark the name of your program and add a note that says something like "you can use the GPL as long as you don't name your program FooBarProg2000(tm). Otherwise you can't redistribute at all." Adding simple exceptions to an existing license is a good way to customize them without having to write new ones from scratch.

    What you DO NOT want to do is write YET ANOTHER half-assed free software license. The world is full of them, thanks. Every damn company (or rather, their lawyers) thinks they have to invent their own silly license. Stop that! Besides, a license is not something you just "throw together". It needs to be very carefully written to protect everybody's rights yet not violate the fundamental software freedoms we all know and love (like being able to *use* the software for any purpose).

    What I'm saying is, if really need a license other than these two, you better have a DAMN GOOD REASON. And don't worry if the license "meet's people's needs". It's your software, not theirs. Pick the license that gives you the warmest most fuzzy happy feeling in your tummy (heh).

    And ignore the pro/anti GPL zealots. To a vast majority of your users, the various free software licenses like BSD and GPL are indistinguishable, and indeed can be completely ignored unless they are *redistributing* the software.

    • Adding exceptions (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cbr2702 ( 750255 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @12:46AM (#13985964) Homepage
      You can also trademark the name of your program and add a note that says something like "you can use the GPL as long as you don't name your program FooBarProg2000(tm). Otherwise you can't redistribute at all." Adding simple exceptions to an existing license is a good way to customize them without having to write new ones from scratch.

      While you can add a note along with your code saying that FooBarProg2000 is your trademark, your exception is a bad idea. Imagine you distribute your software with the following note: "you can distribute this software under the GPL provided you meet criteria FOO, otherwise you have no distribution rights". Person A meets criteria FOO, and distributes your software under the GPL to person B. Person B is now free not to meet criteia FOO, as they recieved the software under the GPL. Adding exceptions like this needs to be done carefully.

      Also note that if you do manage to phrase your exception well, people can't mix it with other GPL code, so it's not all that useful.

      • Imagine you distribute your software with the following note: "you can distribute this software under the GPL provided you meet criteria FOO, otherwise you have no distribution rights". Person A meets criteria FOO, and distributes your software under the GPL to person B. Person B is now free not to meet criteia FOO, as they recieved the software under the GPL.

        You messed up the recursion, that's why. If you inherit from the GPL you're supposed to call your derived license, not the base license, in the recurs
        • Part of the problem is that the GPL is not just a set of restrictions on distribution that you can add to. It looks like what we should be doing is adding to the GPL, not putting a separate restriction on the user. So we want a licencse like: "this software is liscenced under the terms of the GPL with the addition of 'FOO' as condition X to section Y". Otherwise I think you have the problem that the GPL says "distribution under the terms of the GPL is allowed" and so making an additional statement of "co
          • Sorry to be replying to my own post, but I can be pretty nonsensical at times:

            Part of the problem is that the GPL is not just a set of restrictions on distribution that you can add to. It looks like what we should be doing is adding to the GPL, not putting a separate restriction on the user.

            The first sentence is a result of not enough sleep. Ignore it. It once made sense in my head, but on the page means something other than I intended.

            :: yawn ::

            Good night, all

          • "The license for this program follows below. It can be derived from the GPL by replacing all references to the 'GPL' with 'this license', and by adding FOO as section 3.99."

            Of course, that defeats the point of having a single GPL. What exactly is FOO?

    • Oh, come on now. Here's all you need to ask yourself:

      * Do you want to let people distribute your software any way they want, including with less flexible terms than you distribute it? Pick the BSD license.

      * Do you want to let people distribute your software any way they want, as * long as they grant others at least the same rights you granted them? Pick the GPL.

      Nearly correct, but your second one should be "as long as they grant others the same rights over their entire program, not just the part

      • is that it's overly complicated.
        If you want to release on those terms, just state it: "this work is released under the terms of the GPL v2, with the exception that if you include it (or a derivative work) in your own work, you only have to apply the provisions of the clause 2 to this work (or its derivative) and not to your work." or something like it.
        But then again, in the interest of full disclosure, I am not a firm believer in the "mysterious non-existing GPL linking clause".
    • The one license option that CC has that I don't see much of on the software side is "no commercial use."

      Personally I detest such licenses because almost anything can be commercial. If I make a shareware disk and charge a copying fee, well that's probably commercial even if I'm only covering costs according to my own bookkeeping. What if I just use the program in my business but I don't sell the program. If you want to share, share... if someone figures out how to make some money selling or using the program
    • How about the noncommercial attribute? There is no OS equivalent (because it wouldn't be OS), but maybe the submitter wanted to provide that option as well.
    • On the topic of FooBarProg2000(tm), I have recently come across the best audio player for windows.

      It's name is Foobar2000 and it is made by one of the old winamp devs. Closed source but it has a nice SDK.

      http://www.foobar2000.org/ [foobar2000.org]

  • Choose One (Score:4, Interesting)

    by benjamindees ( 441808 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @12:35AM (#13985867) Homepage
    The reason there is no Creative Commons license for software is that there would need to be two, basically equivalent to the BSD license and the GPL. Because software can be distributed in both easily-modifiable and not-easily-modifiable forms, any software license must take special notice of this.
  • There are too many licenses for you to be able to choose one that suits your needs, so you want to add even more crud to the pool of licenses available? As other have pointed out (and more will do so) pick one of the "biggies" - either GPL or BSD. Both licenses seem easy enough to understand, so just pick whichever is closest to your needs and be done with it. Let's not muddy the waters even more by adding to the mess.

  • What's wrong with Creative Commons itself? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gherald ( 682277 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @12:45AM (#13985952) Journal
    There is no reason you cannot use an ordinary Creative Commons license for software. For instance, I was just using Python-IRC [coffeecorner.org]

    But most people prefer either the BSD or GPL for software since they are both hugely popular and compatible in one direction (BSD code can be freely re-licensed under the GPL, and intermixed with already GPLed code). Although I suppose the same might be true of BSD --> CC, there is already a HUGE amount of GPL software out there that you may as well be compatible with if at all possible.

  • Licenses (Score:3, Informative)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @02:09AM (#13986405) Homepage
    There are 3 broad types of 'free software' licenses.

    (1) You HAVE to release source code to the changes you make

    (2) You dont really have to release source code.

    (3) Software thats free but no source code provided.

    Take your pick. If youre worried about further intricacies, just write your own.

    • Take your pick. If you're worried about further intricacies, just write your own.

      That is bad advice. If you write your own license, the chances are that a court would decide that the roll-your-own license doesn't say what you want it to. Plus, anyone wanting to use your software has to try to understand what your license actually means. Ughh ...

    • Your summations are incorrect

      1) Contradicts "free" and won't get you OSI certified
      I think you meant "if you distribute a modified binary you have to distribute the source, on demand"

      and 2) & 3) are essentially the same

      your advice is essentially poor, off to license school with you!
  • Go look up the OSI listing. Theres a license for just about ANYTHING anyone would want.

    Please do not make a new license for no good reason. It is just adding to the problem.

  • There's GPL, LGPL, and BSD (Score:3, Informative)

    by H4x0r Jim Duggan ( 757476 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @03:00AM (#13986674) Homepage Journal
    There's probably a good reason why the article doesn't say why the GPL is not suitable - namely that this hasn't been thought through.

    As Torvalds says, the GPL is the simplist wording possible for a complex system. Keep in mind that Creative Commons licenses are not simple, they're just hidden behind a laymans explanation. Did the poster of the article realise that the 1-page summary of the Creative Commons licenses is not the legally binding part?
    • More than just the complexities behind it- figuring out what they actually do is hard. There's what, a dozen variations of the CC license? Damned if I know which means which. And some of them are basicly proprietary with all the restrictions tacked on. CC reads like it was designed by comittee, with one uncomprimising member who insisted even no rights allowed be an option.

  • If you took one second to look at the CC site... (Score:4, Informative)

    by charlie763 ( 529636 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @03:48AM (#13986915)
    Here's a link to a page on the GPL that you might understand http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/ [creativecommons.org] and this http://creativecommons.org/license/ [creativecommons.org] will help you choose a license. Look at the lower left of the page for easily read non-CC licenses.
  • So what????

    We are not talking here about everyone, but about YOU and YOUR software. It is TO YOU the one the license YOU choose should fit!

    I think you focused the problem the wrong way.

    You should think FIRST how do you want your software to be used and distributed, only THEN you should think about which license you should distribute your software with in order to achieve YOUR goals.

    There is nothing as a "license mess". A license is only a written agreement between you and the one you share your software w

  • Whatever happened to Public Domain software? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Quarters ( 18322 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @10:13AM (#13988457)
    It was all the rage in the late '80s / early '90s.
    • I remember reading an opinion that there is no legal method to make anything public domain. Under current copyright law, the creator automatically gets copyright when the work is created. The only way for the creator to relinquish copyright is to sign it over to someone else, or to distribute it with a license. But this isn't the same as public domain. The only way for something to become public domain is for the copyright to expire (after, what is it now, 90 years after the authors death?)
      • That's ridiculous. Let's say you're taken to court by the author of a piece of software that was released as "public domain". You argue that it was clearly the intention of the author to allow any use, as if it were truly in the public domain due to an expired license. What judge or jury wouldn't accept that argument? (Assume there are no non-copyright issues involved in this case.) So while there may not be any way to truly place something in the public domain, merely making it clear that that is your inte

  • Public domain (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rfisher ( 6491 )
    Consider just making it public domain.

    Most people who will bother looking at it will end up treating it that way, & who wants to waste time or hire lawyers to waste time looking for violations.

    A license is just a lot of legal jargon that most people won't bother reading & that, if ever tested, will end up meaning something different that what you thought you meant when you wrote/chose it.

    You'll get everything you'd get from a "creative commons" without the hassle.

    The GPL or LGPL or even the BSD lice
  • Is there a Creative Commons equivalent for software licenses?

    Yes, it's called the "Creative Commons". More information can be found at creativecommons.org [creativecommons.org]

    Seriously though, did you miss the popup on the Creative Commons licence generator that lets you specify content type? Did you miss the content type called "Interactive"? What did you think that applied to?

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