Hi brian, On Wed, 02 Jan 2013 06:05:32 +0400 brian d foy <brian.d....@gmail.com> wrote:
> In article <20121228112205.1f8b3...@lap.shlomifish.org>, Shlomi Fish > <shlo...@shlomifish.org> wrote: > > > > I am hereby asking you to consider relicensing the content of > > http://learn.perl.org/ and other perl.org sites, which is currently under > > the restrictive Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NonDerivatives > > licence ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ ) under a > > less restrictive licence, to allow for maximum reuse, redistribution and > > building upon, which in turn will help promote the Perl 5 and Perl 6 > > programming language and ecosystem. > > > I've never heard anyone complain that they stopped advocating Perl > because of a license issue. > > I'd rather see people make new content to add to the old content. For > any content that I've generated, I want the licenses to stay the same. I think you're missing the point here. People won't likely completely stop advocating Perl, but there are a few risks here. One of them is that people won't contribute. Not everyone would want to fork the perl.org repository and make pull requests only to have their content later licensed as CC-by-nc-nd, which they often find unacceptable. I'm not sure one can even legally fork and modify such a repository due to the Non-Derivatives licence. On the other hand, with http://perl-begin.org/ , you can take https://bitbucket.org/shlomif/perl-begin , fork/clone it , modify it to your heart's content, and then set up http://not-perl-begin.com/ which would be similar to http://perl-begin.org/ , and as long as they provide a clickable link to http://perl-begin.org/ and otherwise provide the necessary attribution, it will be perfectly OK by me[1]. But you cannot do that with http://www.perl.org/ , and people will feed bad about contributing to something that they and other people cannot benefit from after that. Do you think the Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects would be as large as they are today if they were under an -ND licence? Do you think perl or CPAN would be? Part of the reasons why open content works is for the same reason that open source works - because every one can benefit from it. Right now on https://github.com/perlorg/perlweb/issues/63 , the main argument that Ask (ABH) gave on his last comment was that he's afraid spammers and other Internet low-life will build upon this content for their stuff. Well, spammers (being scam) often don't respect text under restrictive, non-redistributable, licences (nicknamed “All Rights Reserved” or “ARR” in Creative Commons speak), and will likely have no problems with CC-by-nc-nd. Furthermore, even if they set up link farms based on 100% public domain content, it would still be unethical, something that many ISPs, hosting providers and search engines. won't favour and will take down, and often illegal. On the other hand, like I said, making something CC-by-nc-nd deters people from contributing, building upon, forking, and in general “remixing” the content. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_%28book%29 Part of my motivation for the request was in hope to put the first edition of the book /Beginning Perl/ under a less restrictive licence, but as one comment there says this is up to Apress, but relicensing *.perl.org under a less restrictive licence would still be a step in the right direction. Hope that helps. Regards, Shlomi Fish {{{ [1] - some people cannot even get the attribution part of the CC licences right, but that's a different issue. }}} -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Funny Anti-Terrorism Story - http://shlom.in/enemy I don’t believe in fairies. Oops! A fairy died. I don’t believe in fairies. Oops! Another fairy died. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
