Obviously I would prefer CC-BY. Also obviously this is technically a violation of terms and an object lesson in why copyleft and share-alike terms are bad bad bad... - Cameron Neylon

Sorry? What is bad bad bad about asking people to to contribute on equal terms? - Egon Willighagen

The fact that it badly limits interoperability because you end up with incompatible share-alike licenses, or worse, you want to use a work in a new work for which there is no appropriate form of license. Ontologies are a case in point. If you can't decide what the appropriate license is to use then you can't use any share-alike licensed material to develop that ontology. And if you use a license which is inappropriate and therefore unenforceable you are violating the terms of the original license. - Cameron Neylon

But this wikipedia case, and the related issues over moving OpenStreetMap to oDBL, are also a clear point. The use of of GFDL meant you couldn't mixup Wikipedia with CC-BY material, so to make this worse they are carrying out a mass violation of the terms of the original contribution. Which I hope people will support and will be carried. But on a legal basis it probably means that the whole license of Wikipedia is unenforceable in law. - Cameron Neylon

I find it a bit awkward to criticise someone's wishes if you are getting a free lunch... - Egon Willighagen

if you want to leech^Wreuse, go for the same license, otherwise start from scratch... - Egon Willighagen

Just start a CC0-licensed #Wikipedia... CoC0pedia anyone? - Egon Willighagen

@Egon: what if you want to "leech" two sources, with incompatible licenses? Both creators want you to re-use their stuff, provided you license the way they like; you are willing to do that; but you cannot because most SA licences are not compatible with each other. Now what? In this way copyleft licenses end up defeating their users' own purposes. - Bill Hooker

@Bill You can always contact the copyright owners about it... WP, here, has taken the solution of dual licensing - Egon Willighagen

Further exposition by David Wiley here: http://opencontent.org/blog... - Bill Hooker

@Bill how is this different from the BSD/GPL flamewars? - Egon Willighagen

@Egon its not very different. The difference lies mainly in the fact that BSD/GPL was about code and code (mostly) interoperates only with other code. Even with text or pictures its not such a big problem but when you want to mash up a database with text with images, with ontologies, with code, to make something for which no proper license exists yet that you get into trouble. - Cameron Neylon from twhirl

I guess it's pretty similar (and about as likely to come to an agreed resolution!). - Bill Hooker

I come back to to example of ontologies. Given we have no idea what the legally appropriate license for an ontology is at the moment, it is currently a violation of tems to use any information from Wikipedia or any GPL code to build an ontology. If you're building one then yes you can ask the rights holders, but if you want to build 100,000 from 1,000,000 different web resources with a mixture of licenses and share-alike provisions? - Cameron Neylon from twhirl

Then you use a workflow to remix the content on the fly. - Egon Willighagen

But you can't. Your not legally entitled to under the terms of the various licences...it is the act of remixing that is explicitly forbidden if you can't make it available under the correct specific license - Cameron Neylon from twhirl

Interesting... in the world of Open Source, licenses are about what you can and cannot do when redistributing... Cameron, are you suggesting I cannot remix at my home computer at all, even if I do not redistribute, but just analyze the combined data? - Egon Willighagen

Absolutely - if you create a derivative work and "prevent access to it by technical means" then you are violating the license. There would probably be a reasonableness test, i.e. how much time is it reasonable for you to hold it in an inaccessible state before making it available (days, a week perhaps). But what you certainly can't do is create a transient derivative work as a means of getting around the license. - Cameron Neylon

In copyright which is what the creative commons licenses depend on it is the _act_ of copying that is the crucial point, not redistribution. To the extent that GPL depends on copyright the same would be true. - Cameron Neylon

Where the community of practice says the important point may be different of course but then we get into practice as opposed to legal terms. What worries me most is that people seem to "have a feel" for what is ok, which is fine and good, but then don't necessarily respect the terms of the license properly. That bad guys are just going to steal anyway - and if they can point to vague practice then you are completely shtoofed in court, assuming you can afford to get there of course - Cameron Neylon

@Cameron Isn't the whole point of Copyleft that it transforms all the restrictions of copyright into general permission with the one exception of "distribution must be share-alike"? Eg. this language "If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license." http://creativecommons.org/license... - Anders Norgaard

I don't think it is about the act of copying (generally, distributing complete, unmodified copies is allowed in all of the various open licenses). It is about other rights that are exclusive to the copyright holder, especially the creation of derivative works (and related actions such as incorporation in compilations, etc.). I am also reminded that copyright does not extend to ideas, only particular expressions of them. I would like to see a worked example of an ontology where there would be a concern for infraction of someone's copyright. This would help me understand exactly where the pinch is felt. - Dennis E. Hamilton

Anders, sorry that statement was stronger than I meant it. Just gone back and re-read in detail (again). My point is that the act of licensing happens when the copying happens. At that point you are bound by the license. My understanding of what Egon was proposing in terms of the ontology was that by avoiding distributing the initial re-mixed object (but presumably still distributing the ultimate products) this gets around the terms which I don't beleive it does. - Cameron Neylon

Dennis, the major concern is with people copyrighting data in one form or another. This is for two reasons 1) is the major confusion over which bits are copyrightable, where do you draw the line and 2) data gets re-used in lots of contexts, many of them brand new without any appropriate licensing regime so it is easy to imagine situations where e.g. you want to remix public domain data with something from an oDBL licensed database, with a written text (CC-BY-SA), and perhaps use some GPL code as well - Cameron Neylon

And I was wrong about redistribution per se. I was getting confused between the grant of the license and the license terms. - Cameron Neylon

I don't understand how someone can compel me to distribute something I construct or create. And there's a good deal more about this I don't understand. - Bill Anderson from twhirl

Bill, I got that completely arse backwards and made a complete mess of it. You're not compelled to distribute - that was me not reading the license terms properly. My personal view, which I have completely failed to express clearly, is that people should be encouraged (strongly and forcefully) to distribute and open up derivative works but that licensing is not either the most robust or effective way of doing that encouragement. And further that doing it via licensing is storing up problems for the future. - Cameron Neylon

The question is: what do you want your license to do, enable re-use of your work or prevent it? If you insist on absolute control over (certain aspects of) the re-use, e.g. with copyleft, you're going to have to accept that you'll prevent a lot of legitimate re-use as well. - Bill Hooker

The rationale for copyleft seems to be: what if I release my work, someone makes Something with it, patents that Something, and then I have to pay money even to build Something Mark 2 from my own work? Well yeah, that would suck. If copyleft clauses allowed "the same or similar" licensing, that would protect against the Something Theft and allow re-use, but existing clauses typically allow only THE SAME license. That blocks Something Theft, and also prevents most if not all remixing. - Bill Hooker

@Bill Aren't you overstating the impact of copyleft clauses? Unless you think "you share with me, I build on your work, but don't share with you" is legitimate, I can't think of any legitimate re-use cases that copyleft prevents. - Anders Norgaard

I get most of my ideas on this issue from David Wiley, see the links here: http://www.sennoma.net/main... - Bill Hooker

Copyleft licenses can become a hindrance, but they do have their place. Personally I believe anything that is a core platform, where the value comes from what you build on top of that platform then a more liberal license (Apache, etc) is preferable, e.g. Rails is an MIT license. If you want to "productize" the code itself, then a copy left license might not be a bad idea. - Deepak Singh

Anders, better answers are in those links from DW, but briefly: the main problem is remix, not reuse/rework/redistribute. Copyleft prevents the illegitimate use case (rework) you describe, but it also prevents remix: if your stuff is CC-BY and mine is GPL, they cannot legally be used together because there is no way to satisfy the copyleft requirements of BOTH licenses at once. There is a tremendous amount of incompatibility between copyleft licenses, and that's why copyleft = buying future problems. - Bill Hooker

Not sure about the particular use case here... but there is something like interfaces too... in Open Source, if there is a clear independent interface both can use, then the components are not said to depend on each other, and the license need not to be put in agreement... would that hold for data too? Is a SQL table design not merely a very clean interface? Likewise using a third party ontology in RDF situations? - Egon Willighagen

In data things get very messy because the rules are not consistent with database rights in Europe and none in the US so on top of potential limitations there is also huge potential for confusion. Part of the problem comes when people use the wrong type of license for an object (e.g. CC for software or a database, GPL for an ontology perhaps?). The legal effect of this is that rights are completely unclear. So I don't know, not sure anyone else does, and may be a different in different courts as well... - Cameron Neylon