Stilgar
Junior Member
Posts: 194
Registered: 07-06 |
(Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer (nor do I aspire to be one) so take my assessment with a grain of salt.)
As far as I can tell, there isn't any Creative Commons license that would be compatible with three-clause BSD style licensing like Freedoom uses. As I understand it, CC basically allows a mix and match of the following terms:
Attribution
Share Alike
Non-commercial
No Derivatives
Selecting Non-commercial or No Derivatives, by nature, would put anything licensed under those terms outside the scope of FSF or OSI definitions, and would be more like releasing something as "freeware" as in "free beer".
Attribution (as is the term selected here), is not outside the scope of FSF or OSI definitions AFAIK, but it also isn't a requirement of either BSD or GNU licenses, hence the incompatibility the FSF mentions since the GPL doesn't allow adding additional restrictions. You could integrate something under a BSD style license with that, but then it would be kind of similar to how you can take something under a BSD license and make something closed-source out of it, the assembled work wouldn't really be BSD any more, and wouldn't be GPL compatible (and GPL compatibility is a desirable thing IMHO.)
Share Alike, if it were the only term selected, might be GPL compatible unless there's something fiddly in the legalese, but as far as I know just about any CC licensed thing that's SA is BY also. Plus, as with the above, adding it into a BSD-style project would make it not wholly BSD-style anymore - if you were going to start imposing share-alike restrictions it might as well be GPL instead.
There's also Sampling and Sampling Plus but as I recall both those imply Non-commercial.
So, by my understanding there is no Creative Commons license that is as unrestricted as a three-clause BSD license is. Having things of multiple licensing gobbed into a single IWAD would also IMHO be a bad idea, I'm not sure what the legal definitions would say but as I see it an assembled IWAD ought to be looked at as a single compiled unit (comparable to a compiled binary) with the individual lumps as its "source code".
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07-06-08 13:06 
