Fontana: What open source licensing could learn from Creative Commons (Opensource.com) [LWN.net]

Fontana: What open source licensing could learn from Creative Commons (Opensource.com)

Posted Dec 15, 2012 1:37 UTC (Sat) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677)
Parent article: Fontana: What open source licensing could learn from Creative Commons (Opensource.com)

"Admiration" is a bit more than I meant to convey. The context is that in the past I have viewed the idea of a future CC-style free software license suite as a nightmarish scenario; I am now able to imagine some potential benefits. But the only way something like this could work is if you carefully constrain the involvement of lawyers as well as what I refer to in the article as (for lack of a better term) "FLOSS establishment institutions". (Those who know me well enough will recognize the allusion here to my semi-joking use of 'The Establishment' to refer to influential interest groups in free software that exercise a political, administrative or bureaucratic role rather than a software development role. At least, that's what I sometimes mean by 'The Establishment'. :)

Fontana: What open source licensing could learn from Creative Commons (Opensource.com)

Posted Dec 19, 2012 19:21 UTC (Wed) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link]

I think that the improved license compatibility has come about organically as different orgs update their licenses and bring them into the 21st century. To my mind, there's now an upwardly-compatible continuum of best-of-type licenses:

   Apache 2.0 (permissive)
-> MPL 2.0 (weak copyleft)
-> LGPL 3.0 (medium strength copyleft)
-> GPL 3.0 (strong copyleft)
-> AGPL 3.0 (network service copyleft)

Apart from the fact that there's no central committee, that seems to me to be the suite you are looking for.

Gerv