tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (CC licensing, vs. GFDL)

Scott Morrison comments on "CC licensing, vs. GFDL" (6965)

Scott Morrison — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:53:43 -0700

I don't propose we actually do this, but we could say: all content is available under the CC license, and all content in posts with numbers above 31234 (or wherever we're up to) is alternatively available under the GFDL.

Martin Orr comments on "CC licensing, vs. GFDL" (6927)

Martin Orr — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:40:12 -0700

The things you can require people to include in an attribution are limited as explained in the CC FAQ. Furthermore, you can only control the content of the attribution and not its format: according to the text of the license, the attribution "may be implemented in any reasonable manner". So I think that in the current attribution requirements, the requirement to link to the user profile is not legally binding, but the rest is.

As "Licensor" in the wording of the licence, I think that MO is free to alter the requirements without causing any problems for existing posts (except that dropping the requirement to mention the name or pseudonym of the author might not be allowed). On the other hand, MO definitely can't change existing posts to a completely different licence (e.g. GFDL) without getting every authors' consent.

Harry Gindi comments on "CC licensing, vs. GFDL" (6924)

Harry Gindi — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:59:38 -0700

IANAL is such an unfortunate acronym...

Anton Geraschenko comments on "CC licensing, vs. GFDL" (6920)

Anton Geraschenko — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:03:10 -0700

Another question: To what extent are any of the requirements in the attribution page legally binding? The real question is, "are we legally allowed to change the attribution requirements, or would that cause some sort of problem for existing posts?" I assume there wouldn't be any kind of legal problem, but IANAL and I'm not willing to hire one out of pocket for this question.

Harry Gindi comments on "CC licensing, vs. GFDL" (6909)

Harry Gindi — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 06:48:48 -0700

It seems like de Jong wanted to copy it verbatim or it doesn't make any sense.

Andrea comments on "CC licensing, vs. GFDL" (6907)

Andrea — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 06:20:32 -0700

Harry, I still do not understand. Did de Jong want to copy verbatim the proof of Bjorn? Or was he planning to rewrite an argument he had learned from MO? In the second case, there is no issue of licence whatsoever, in the very same way even if you learned programming by patching Apache you don't need to comply with the Apache licence when you are writing your own open source project (provided you don't copy code).

Harry Gindi comments on "CC licensing, vs. GFDL" (6905)

Harry Gindi — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 04:31:41 -0700

Willie, that's de Jong, the founder of the Stacks project, which is an open-source textbook being written collaboratively on commutative algebra, algebraic geometry with the specific goal of including everything you need up to algebraic stacks. The problem he noted was that for the Stacks project to be in good legal standing with both licenses, he had to get permission from Bjorn Poonen.

I don't think that the license matters if you're putting it in a paper (you would just cite as usual).

WillieWong comments on "CC licensing, vs. GFDL" (6904)

WillieWong — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:30:07 -0700

I agree with Andrea. It isn't completely clear what the author of the blog post was trying to do. I believe that if you paraphrase (or, understand the argument, digest it, and re-write it), a citation is sufficient (and even that is ethical, and not a legal requirement). Then again, it does sound like the author wanted to just copy latex code directly.

I don't particularly care what license MO uses. But after reading about GFDL it sounds like a sensible license.

Andrea comments on "CC licensing, vs. GFDL" (6902)

Andrea — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:57:35 -0700

And in any case I think a MO question is not suitable to be incorporated verbatim in a book. If you have to elaborate on it, you can surely do without worrying for the licence. We all have learned from textbooks which did not use free licences.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "CC licensing, vs. GFDL" (6901)

Anton Geraschenko — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:28:55 -0700

Related question: what counts as "fair use"? I was under the impression that people only had to worry about the license if they wanted to publish fairly large chunks of MO verbatim.

Scott Morrison comments on "CC licensing, vs. GFDL" (6897)

Scott Morrison — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:03:10 -0700

There's an interesting blog post at http://math.columbia.edu/~dejong/wordpress/?p=651 about the fact that MO uses the CC license, which is incompatible with the GFDL license. The consequence in this case was having to ask permission directly from the post author (Poonen), before it was possible to incorporate this material into the stacks project.

Any comments? Should we just dual license everything under CC and GFDL, so that legitimate users of the content just take their pick?