Re: semweb/license

[Asheesh Laroia <asheesh creativecommons org>]

On Wed, 12 Dec 2007, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

> I do hate opening this can of worms, but it was discussed today in few
> places that semweb is distributed under terms of Creative Commons
> Attribution License 2.0, which is not GPL compatible according to what
> debian-legal@ guys say.

I thought I would bring Joshua, the author of semweb 
<http://razor.occams.info/code/semweb/>, into the conversation.

Joshua, would you be willing to license semweb under a standard Free 
Software license?  The Creative Commons licenses aren't compatible with 
the GPL, which is sad since the GPL F-Spot project seems to want to use 
your code and can't for that reason.  Here's one that seem like you might 
like it (plus is compatible with F-Spot):

The MIT License <http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php> says, 
basically, "Do what you want, but you have to leave my copyright notice in 
the source code of any derived work" - that sounds like why you picked 
"Attribution".

For comparison, the Java SPARQL project 
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/sparql> that you said you based yours on 
chose the GNU LGPL.  GNU offers two main licenses: The GPL, which says 
basically, "If you distribute this work linked to your separate work, or 
if you distribute a modified copy of this work, then that work must be 
under the same license."  The LGPL is the GPL with an extra note, "But if 
you just combine (without changing) this with your work, then you can 
distribute the combination under whatever license you want."

CC does tell you to avoid using CC licenses for software for these 
reasons; see 
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F 
.

Sorry about the long email.  Do keep us posted!

-- Asheesh.

--
A bug in the hand is better than one as yet undetected.